Facebook keeps spamming me with different variations of "Friend Finder", "Find more friends" & co (mostly on the right column, where the ads belong), and I'm just wondering: why are they doing that?
I already have more than 250 friends, so they could see that I'm not new to Facebook, and it's likely that I already added almost all of my friends and people-I-know-enough-to-be-considered-by-Facebook-as-a-friend. So their goal is not to help me find real friends (that is, somehow improve my Facebook experience), but just to add more connections to their social graph. So if there is no interest for me in that, there must be some interest for them, but I don't see it.
Also my primary thought was that more friends = more information about me = more targeted advertising = more profit for them, but I'm really not sure if adding people who are not my real friends would help Facebook target me better…
What's the explanation?
Best Answer
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!