Scientists use Facebook to find your partner and best friend

Love is a mysterious and profound thing right? A lot of people might consider that true, but a group of scientists reckon they can unlock some of its secrets using Facebook.

The scientists, who are a part of Facebook’s data science team, have found that they can piece together whether people are romantically linked, or even very close personal friends based just on who they are linked to (and no, they didn’t cheat and peek at people’s relationship statuses).

Explaining the project, the researchers say:

Using data from a large sample of Facebook users, we find that this task can be accomplished with high accuracy, but doing so requires the development of a new measure of tie strength that we term `dispersion’ — the extent to which two people’s mutual friends are not themselves well-connected.

In simple English: you’re more likely to be romantically linked to someone if you have mutual friends that touch a number of areas of your life but those mutual friends are not extensively connected. The same is apparently true of close personal friends.

The scientists say that the results offer methods for identifying who online applications should be targeting, and also suggest a potential expansion of existing theories the strength of connections between people.

That, in turn, could be used to make the stuff you see in your Facebook news feed more relevant to you. “If we can do a better job of identifying all the most important people in your life, there is a lot of opportunity to make Facebook better,” says Lars Backstrom, a data scientist at Facebook.

While all this data mining is terribly clever, we can’t be the only ones who now feel tempted to try and mess with social network.