Today I was doing some research on Facebook as part of my work, when I hit upon an interesting feature. Actually it's just the friends search function. The interesting part comes from Facebook trying to show you people you are more likely to know, and it does that by looking at the number of mutual friends between the two of you. What's really cool is Facebook will show you these mutual friends.
Still, why is it interesting? Because it lets you discover connections you never thought existed. Most of time the mutual friends are from the same "group", for example my primary school friends, so it is not surprising they are all friends with that person. Occassionally, I find a person knows two of my friends but from different groups. As far as I know these two friends aren't related to each other, but they know the same person!
I wonder if this feature can be used for some kind of datamining application, such as finding out if two of your friends from different groups knows each other. I am sure more malicious applications exists. It is also remarkable that I can find these connections given I have only added about 60 friends. Imagine what you can come up with if you have hit the friends cap of 5000?
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