Facebook Public Message – How to Add a Public Message for Friend Requests

Facebook has access to all friendship-data on their site, even if you lock down the privacy settings. As an addition many users share their contact-book or even e-mails with Facebook. Most peoples have filled out their profile quite decent so it has data about your school, your employer, your current place, your interests and so on. Although Facebook states it does not use it, they can track all users (and even non-users) across many websites via the "like"-button which is transcluded directly from Facebook.

From this data it can calculate this friend requests.

First, Facebook as a whole is more valuable if it maximises user volumes. So they're never going to stop wanting you to add that new friend from some other address book.

Second, the Facebook experience is pretty lame if you have only a few Facebook friends. So creating a new link may be a marginal value gain for you, but it may help the other party get into the sweet spot and become a regular and committed user.

More speculatively, Facebook ads themselves seem (from what I get offered, anyway), pretty feeble, so maybe there's an element of Facebook improving your general perception of the right-hand column by sometimes not even showing you some horrible, mis-targeted ad and just doing self-promotion, not caring all that much whether you respond. In this case, you've responded indirectly by talking about Facebook, I'm making a mental note to see if I am getting that same treatment, and we're both even more bought into the idea that Facebook is an unassailable, valuable site in a way that Myspace and other toppled social media towers must not have been!