Comment by joe_the_user | Hacker News Reader

Comment by joe_the_user | Hacker News Reader

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I think this is a problem Facebook only thinks it has. Or only thinks it can solve. Or only thinks most people are trying to solve.

There's every indication the US is essentially saturated by Facebook. My in-real-life friends who want to be on Facebook are already there. That's the usual ~150 that I think studies show is max nearly everyone can maintain. I also have a nearly equal number of purely Internet or Facebook or Professional friends. I'm not inclined to have less but I get the strong feeling a good portion of my friends want less, not more people to interact with online.

I wouldn't mind meeting new people. But I no reason to have more Facebook friends.

Perhaps the only way Facebook can keep its momentum going is to sponsor picnics and couples dancing across country. The only way to get aggregate more Facebook connections between people would be for people to suddenly actually have more "real life" friends.

> the usual ~150 that I think studies show is max nearly everyone can maintain

This is what you're thinking of:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

I don't believe Facebook set up this contest in order to find solutions to a problem they have. The biggest clue is that the graph given to contenders was a directed graph, unlike Facebook's social graph.

It seems very likely to me they used that problem in order to find good candidates for their data-group, which is exactly what this contest was all about. Either that, or they are trying to expand the social graph of Instagram :)

I'm pretty sure that Facebook's social graph is directed since they introduced the Subscribe To feature.

I think these algorithms may be used behind the scene to find out interesting sources of content for a user. Not necessarily for adding new friends (although this was the context about), but maybe to select interesting news for you.

You might be right for people like you, established Facebook users. But for users who have accounts less than 2 weeks old, this makes a substantial difference.

Indeed, it will help with onloading and increasing usefulness due to network effects, etc..

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