Facebook thinks I should be friends with lots of people I don’t know, mostly because of shared friends. If five folks I know also know John Doe, it stands to reason I might know him, too. You get false positives with this approach, but that’s ok, because you also end up with renewed connections to people you haven’t seen or spoken to in years.
What’s weird is when you get strange friend intersections. Right now, there’s someone on my “you may know…” list that I do not know, but with whom I share three completely unrelated friends, at least from my perspective.
The first shared friends is someone I know from The Well, an online community I’ve been a member of for a decade or more.
The second is from my high school in Mississippi.
The third is a playwrite my wife and I hosted in Houston when she was working on a piece for a local group we volunteered with.
Bizarre.
I’ve had that same phenomenon twice. There’s a guy in Baltimore who knows a former bandmate from NC, a lady writer in CA, and a guy I went to high school with in AL. And there’s a guy here in Austin who used to date a woman I know very circuituously – she’s a friend of a musician I know in PA who was the college roommate of my buddy Joe in NYC, who I met through an online community. This guy in Austin is apparently very good friends with my neighbor (and former bandmate) Kirk and his wife Stacey, to the point where they have pictures on their F-book pages of a vacation they all took together. Big nation, tiny little virtual world.