Mediaboss Marketing

Building 16 at Facebook headquarters is home to the Fishbowl, Mark Zuckerbergs private all-glass corner conference room that sits beneath a red vintage sign that reads The Hacker Company. Not far from the sign a very visual proclamation that the social networking giant is eternally intent on building new stuff and improving the stuff it has already built youll find one of the companys most important operations: the News Feed engineering team.

These are the programmers who oversee the Facebook tool that instantly streams all sorts of new information including status posts, Likes, links, and photos to more than a billion Facebook users across the globe. The teams ultimate task is to make sure your news feed delivers content youre actually interested in. Thats important because Facebook wants you to keep using its social network, but also because this stream of information includes ads and other sponsored content, the stuff that makes the company money.

At the helm of this enterprise is Lars Backstrom, a 31-year-old with a computer science Ph.D from Cornell University. My day job is to improve the quality of News Feed, he says, during a recent interview at Facebook HQ, in Menlo Park, California.

This week, with a paper published on the online academic research site ArXiv.org, Backstrom revealed one of the recent fruits of his labor: an experimental algorithm that analyzes your personal network of friends, seeking to identify your strongest relationships. Developed alongside his former Cornell thesis adviser, Jon Kleinberg, the algorithm is strong enough to independently identity your spouse or romantic partner and even predict when youre headed for a breakup.

Eric Horvitz

Yes, odds are youve already told Facebook who your romantic partner is via your profile page. But this algorithm does much more than that. Its not a party trick. Its a way for Facebook to better understand who you are and, ultimately, serve you more stuff that you wan to see.

Backstroms research is part of a growing movement at companies and universities to use machine learning and large amounts of online data to better understand human behavior and interactions and interests. Extending our knowledge about people through the computational lens provided by large scale online services is unprecedented, says Eric Horvitz, managing co-director of the Microsoft Research lab in Redmond, Washington. These kinds of data analytics are revolutionizing social science and changing our deep understanding of people as social beings.

Some projects will even explore how information that ripples across the web can help us better analyze the effects of the world we live in how Google, Microsoft and Yahoo searches can be used to detect drug side effects, for instance, or how social media can predict epidemics. Backstroms algorithm predicts relationships, and as it turns out, that helps improve the online services that give us all that data in the first place. There is a deep scientific interest in the structure of human ties, says Horvitz. Understanding peoples preferences and interests is core in providing an engaging and informative service.

Whats more, an engaging and informative service can directly translate into profits in the form of improved sales and better advertising, and that means companies like Facebook, Microsoft and Google are doubly interested in this kind of research.

Backstroms project draws from studies done in the 1980s by sociologist Scott Feld on the organization of social ties (.pdf). But it introduces a new metric that can capture some of the complexity and nuances of social lives a metric that could be used to make predictions about peoples activities and interests.

Link:
Why Guessing Your Romantic Partner Is So Important to Facebook