I recently discovered something really weird about Facebook.
I was at a friend’s and he was about to sign up for Facebook. As soon as he finished the sign up procedure he was asked to be friends with some guys he truly knew in real life.
How can that be? He was totally new to Facebook and nobody could have accidentally stumbled upon him. He was kind of surprised and so was I.
So the only possible solution I could make up is the “Import Contacts” feature of Facebook. It let’s you connect your Yahoo or GMail account and search your contacts there for registered Facebook users. The new thing for me here is that Facebook not only looks them up, but stores them somehow to suggest you to connected contacts as soon as some of the contacts may sign up. For me, that is sick and impressive at the same time.
If you simply start a very rough calculation you’ll see what I mean:
- According to Facebook Stats they have like 400 million active users
- Say about a fourth of them used the “Import Contacts” feature, thats 100 million users
- Say the average contact import is “only” 5 contacts – although I’m sure it’s more – we have 500 million adresses to be stored
So that means, every time a new user signs up his mail address is being searched for in more than 500 million addresses within a few seconds? And I didn’t even count double or triple relationships in here, there is not only one person in the world having your mail address in his mail account, right?
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