Researchers show how to make friends on Facebook through location
A group of researchers at Cambridge University have discovered a new way to encourage social connections through Facebook, based on location. They summised that people who frequent the same locations – local bars, gyms, clubs etc.. are likely to have similar interests and so become friends. It’s an extension of the ‘friends of friends’ service introduced through Facebook, looking at similarities between people to determine their likelihood to connect with each other. In their research, the group used Gowalla to look at connections made between people who went to similar hang-outs. They found that in 30% of cases, people ended up becoming friends based on the places that they visit. They believe the same logic can be applied to Facebook, creating a new friend prediction service.
Making the global, local
What this research throws up is the increase in localisation when everything, including our communities, has become virtual. It looks at location being a factor for establishing connections again, harking back to pre-social networking or internet days, when local establishments would be the central meeting point. This is emphasised in the approach to the experiment, as one of the researchers – Salvatore Scellato explains : “We considered the entropy of a place to find venues that are more likely to foster social links, such as offices and gyms, rather than train stations or museums. We discovered that two users visiting a place with low entropy, that is, a place with a handful of people who are regulars, are highly likely to develop a social connection,” What this experiment does is take an established concept of building connections that has shaped society for centuries, but brings it into the 21st century through social technologies.
The experiment takes location-based networking onto the next stage, beyond using it as a means of sharing information with your existing friends and into a method of actually building friendships. While the concept is interesting, the results may be skewed slightly by the fact that they used Gowalla in the research. It remains a fairly niche location-based site, used more by people with ‘heavy’ social media habits. While they may be comfortable connecting and building friendships through a location service, this may not necessarily cross over into the mainstream and Facebook, where connections tend to be fewer and based on real-life interactions.
Social intelligence
What’s perhaps a little unsettling about a concept like this, is the fact that social networks become more intelligent than us, and are able to predict who we want to become friends with, before we even know ourselves. Rather than waiting for an inevitable connection to happen in real life, this method takes away from that completely and uses an entirely scientific approach to establishing friendships. Now of course, it’s not fool-proof as there is a lot more than similar locations that determine the likelihood of someone to get on, but it shows the changing concept of communities and connections. It’s no longer up to us, but who the social network of choice thinks we should be friends with…
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