Can Facebook Tell When Your Relationship Is Doomed?
A Facebook Employee's Network The circle in the middle represents the Facebook user. In the lower left, one circle serves as a bridge between two more sparse clusters. That's the user's spouse. Backstrom and Kleinberg Give up now. Facebook knows everything. According to a new paper, the makeup of your Facebook network might even be able to tell you when your relationship isn't going to last. The research, from Cornell University's Jon Kleinberg and Facebook engineer Lars Backstrom, analyzed 1.3 million random Facebook users who listed a spouse or significant other in their profile. Each person had between 50 and 20,000 friends. The researchers were able to develop an algorithm that could figure out who a Facebooker was married to 60 percent of the time based on a metric...