Facebook can predict when you’re going to break up.
Yes, apparently the fate of your relationship is not written
in the stars but in your social circle.
Cornell University researcher Jon Kleinberg and Facebook
senior engineer Lars Backstrom proved as much when they presented their
co-written research paper at a social computing conference in February.
The researchers took the datasets of 1.3 million Facebook
users listed as being in a relationship, and found that the more well connected
their mutual friends were, the more likely they were to break up.
This theory is described as dispersion.
Couples with high dispersion have mutual friends who are not
well connected.
Couples with low dispersion have mutual friends who are well
connected.
Therefore the Facebook theory suggests that if you and your
partner share the same social circle on Facebook (low dispersion), you’re less
likely to have your own lives and therefore the relationship is more likely to
implode.
A healthy relationship, according to Facebook, is one where
both partners have connections to a lot of different groups of people, even if
those friendships aren’t particularly strong.
“Instead of embededness, we propose that the link between
and an individual and his or her partner should display a ‘dispersed’
structure: the mutual neighbors of u and v are not well connected to one
another and hence u and v act jointly as the only intermediaries between these
different parts of the network,” the researchers wrote in the study.
In a nutshell, get your own damn lives and friends.
Of course, this algorithm might not take into account the
fact that some couples don’t take their social circles on Facebook particularly
seriously and therefore might look like they don’t have as wide group of
friends when they actually do.
Probably because they are out living their lives.
This story originally appeared on News.com.au.
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