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Inside Facebook Data Mining Research Group

Posted by samzenpus on from the in-your-business dept.

holy_calamity writes "Technology Review has an in depth profile of the team at Facebook tasked with figuring out what can be learned from all our data. The Data Science Team mine that information trove both in the name of scientific research into the patterns of human behavior and to advance Facebook's understanding of its users. Facebook's ad business gets the most public attention, but the company's data mining technology may have a greater effect on its destiny — and users lives."

2 of 30 comments (clear)

  1. TL;DR by slasho81 · · Score: 5, Informative

    I went against my intuition and read TFA. The whole 4,200 words of it.

    It's a complete fluff piece and doesn't contain any interesting new knowledge regarding human behavior or social networks, which you would expect from an "in depth" article about Facebook's data mining.

    There are some tidbits regarding old stuff (4 degrees of freedoms between "friends"), obvious stuff (93% of friends met in real life), and a bunch of other vaguely presented stuff with questionable validity.

    1. Re:TL;DR by linatux · · Score: 5, Funny

      I followed my intuition & barely skimmed the summary. Mining FB would be like making a BBC documentary about reality TV.