Facebook Automatic Friend Finder
Facebook Automatic Friend Finder
If you have been on Facebook for a while you understand how amazing the site is and how easy it is to connect with people from your past. It’s amazing how many people from your past you connect with who are all there offering friend requests. I am friends with people that I have not seen since elementary school. I am even friends with my kindergarten teacher.
It can go on from there, there are high school friends, college friends, former colleagues, and the list just goes on. Apparently, Facebook doesn’t think that is enough because today they released their Automatic Friend Finder.
The feature shows up at the top of your Facebook page and suggests you try it by displaying three of your friends that you know who have already tried the tool to fine new friends as well.
First, at the top of the Automatic Friend Finder page, it reads, “Your friends on Facebook are the same friends, acquaintances and family members that you communicate with in the real world. You can use any of the tools on this page to find more friends.”
From there, Facebook’s Automatic Friend Finder works in several ways. The first option is to enter your email and your email password (great idea for privacy). From there, it will search the emails in your contacts to see if any of them are on Facebook.
Next, there are friend suggestions. This suggests that you “add people you know as friends and become a fan of public profiles you like.” This looks like it is a compiled list of the friends of your friends.
You can also find more friends with a search box that takes a name or email. Below that, you can find friends from whatever affiliations or schools you entered into Facebook. They even try to help you to turn your instant messenger buddies into Facebook Friends through AOL Instant Messenger, ICQ Chat, and Windows Live Messenger.
While this may seem like Facebook is just trying to be helpful, there is more to it than that. One, the more friends and connected you are to Facebook, the more likely you are to continue using the product. Another reason is earnings, the more you use Facebook, the more likely you are to click advertisements.
Have you given Facebook Automatic Friend Finder a try yet? What are your thoughts?
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Chas
13 Jul, 2010
Basically it’s a load of crap. It tells me I am not friends with people who I’ve been friends with for years. I suspect it’s a scam to get info on people for probable advertising or criminal purposes. I recommend you ignore it.
B
14 Jul, 2010
Well, I just got the first pop-up for the automatic friend finder today and after reading this article it doesn’t seem all that bad; but….it is not at all clear as to what it is in the popup itself. It simply said my friends have tried it and found out… Then it asked for my email and password.
I never trust anything right off that asks for that information so of course I google’d it. Although I don’t completely disagree with it, I’m still not doing that. When I made a linkedin account I apparently gave it permission to go through my email and add all of those contacts to my linkedin contacts. What I didn’t know is that gmail seems to log ever individual email incoming or outgoing as a contact and so I have successfully added tons of people that I maybe had one or 2 email exchanges with now on my linkedin profile and I have no idea who they are without going back through my thousands of emails.
In short….not doing that again….especially not with facebook. I try to avoid having business contacts being able to see my “social” facebook page.
French Offcical
20 Jul, 2010
Its worse than crap. It is a lie. The people (i.e. “Your Friends”) that Facebook claims have already tried it are my other Facebook ID’s – and I promise you – I have never tried it.
Justin
21 Jul, 2010
I haven’t tried it, yet. But two of the three people that it said have “tried the automatic Friend Finder” was my brother’s and mother’s accounts. They hardly ever use Facebook.
That gave me enough of a reason to think it was just a scam.
JK
11 Aug, 2010
What worried me was when I received an email friend request from someone with whom I am in regular contact, but on the bottom of the email were names and profile photos of several other people under the heading “other people you may know.” One of them was someone with whom I have had no contact since several years before I joined facebook, or even created the only email address which is associated with my account. The only way it could have legitimately associated us was by her using the friend finder, and then FB searching for profiles with names matching the people in her address book. Despite her clearly choosing NOT to reconnect with me, FB essentially vetoed her decision, contacted me and asked if I wanted to reconnect with her.
The other possibility is even more creepy. I had never used friend finder, so FB would have had to upload my address book without permission, in order to associate our two profiles. Either way I’m not thrilled.
Junie L
17 Aug, 2010
Friend Finder is a scam and a liar. It showed up yesterday on my roommates profile page saying I had used friend finder to find friends but I have never used the service. Today my roommate showed up on mine but she never used it either. Facebook is lying to us and I have no idea how to stop it from using me to advertise their lame friend finder.
Alan S.
4 Jan, 2011
As is the case with many automatic processes that computer users are encouraged to use, there are other methods, although manual and therefore slower, whereby you can do the same thing. True, you may only have 15 to 30 friends and you may notice that some of your friends have hundreds of friends. But if you think you’re forgetting people, just go through your email or your address books. It’s time consuming for users of web mail such as Yahoo because those services don’t seem to offer address books. (Maybe there’s a way to use them to create address books but how you do it is not made obvious). Still, consider the satisfaction you’ll get from doing it manually. If it looks like a task that will take an awful lot of time, you can break up the task into several short sessions and eventually accomplish something that makes much more sense than something automated which would produce hit-or-miss results.