Monday, January 31, 2005

Random Friendster Idea

I had an idea for a Friendster feature the other day. Sometimes I'll click on the link that shows all the ways I'm connected to some person who isn't a friend, and the list will be really long, with many paths of length 2 to the person. This is someone who I should in some sense already know; he or she is connected closely to a lot of my friends and is likely to be in my social circle. It'd be cool to see a list of the people who are not your friends (on the site) but who are most closely connected to you in this way. They might be people who you know and want to add as friends on the site, or if you don't know them it might be fun to wonder why. It would also be interesting to see some score representing this closeness measure on the person's profile, instead of just seeing one path to the person like the site shows now. Anyway, of course I can't work on this, and it might just be a dumb idea, but why have a blog if you can't post possibly dumb ideas and see what happens?

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I sent in the idea and got this response:

"Thanks for the suggestion. I've passed it along to our PM Group. One problem with that is it would tie up the search database finding all the variables...this would mean we'd need to add many more pieces of equipment to handle the additional searches that would have to be done. At any rate, keep the ideas coming. We look at them all."

Hrm. I assumed that since the page loads so fast after clicking "See all connections" that such information was cached; maybe not. In any case, I did my part :)