I have actively started using Facebook as a user in the past week and as I was studying the way Facebook was tracking friends and their associations, a very interesting fact became obvious:
Facebook knows more about my friends than what I know!
I mean this specifically from one particular standpoint: As I was adding some of my friends, who were not in my friends list in Facebook, I noticed that Facebook system was also recommending me to consider adding some individuals as my friend.
I have groups of friends, some of these groups are:
- US Cricket
- India Cricket
- US Badminton
- India Badminton
- Current Workplace
- Past Workplaces
- School
- Colleges
- Madipakkam
etc.
I was extremely surprised to find that there were at least 10 instances (btw, I had less than 100 friends at the time of this observation) where two friends from different lists above (eg. India Badminton and US Workplace) had at least one friend in common in Facebook. Wow. This was a revelation for me.
Given the depth of this information, imagine the level of information Facebook can provide us with data mining in this area. This has evoked many different threads of thoughts such as what if there was a close linkage established between Facebook, IMs, LinkedIn, etc. I have started thinking seriously about these and will soon share it here as I make progress with it.
Overall, I am at a point to agree that Facebook might well become one of the Top Technology Tools of my choice this year, as the power of this tool is undoubtedly much better than many other tools out there.
If you agree and are ready to discuss this, please feel free to reply and we can discuss this topic further.