Facebook could introduce location-based friend suggestions

Researchers at Cambridge University have found a way of predicting potential friends for the social networking website Facebook. It manages this by using the current Facebook feature ‘Places’ which allows people to ‘check in’ to places they visit, this could be anything from a coffee shop to a night club. It then starts to notice patterns between people and the places they visit in the real world, when matched up with the current system (which uses a system based on mutual friends) it is able to accurately predict potential friends.

Researcher Salvatore Scellato said:
“We wanted to investigate the properties of places that encourage connections between visitors and how this could be incorporated into a system that predicts friends,”

He went on to explain how they studied behavior on the location based social networking platform Gowalla:
“We monitored the behaviour of people going to places and the connections they made. We found that lots of people who go to the same places end up adding each other as friends, accounting for around 30 per cent of new social links,”

Before this system is put into practice it must first be approved by Facebook themselves. However there may be a few doubts in mind when considering this impressive piece of technology. Facebook are already facing bad press regarding privacy issues regarding their currently used face-recognition software and introducing a friend-finder that links to the real world so closely at this delicate time, might not be the best move.