Facebook's powerful data mining
I am always impressed at Facebook's ability to recommend familiar faces as friends. Recommending people with mutual friends is obvious, but their data mining goes much further than that.
It has recently recommended a few Miata people to me that I met only once or twice in passing but they wouldn't remember me and have no mutual friends of mine- Bill Cardell, Tom Matano, and Barb Beach. I suspect I must have several fan pages in common with them for Facebook to come up with this.
Today it recommended an old boss to me, of which we have no friends or interests in common. While we both live in the DFW area and list the same employer, that can be said of thousands of facebookers that have not been suggested to me. I know I have never searched for her, and I double checked to confirm she is not in my personal email contact list. Perhaps they found me in her email?
