The Goal:
This project aimed to quantify friendship on the social networking site Facebook. Four false Facebook accounts were created, two male and two female with varying privacy settings at three different schools: MiT, Yale and Stanford. Each false profile added 200 students from their respective schools to see how many would accept the friend request and implicitly give away their personal information through their profile. Through the collection of friend data, "friendship" was quantified by characteristics such as gender, mutual friends, mutual interests, relationship status, location, etc.
Methodology:
To increase believability of the profiles, real photos were used by two volunteers to construct the profiles. Each group individual took on between one to two profiles. From there, they constructed believable characters with continual updates on the profiles. 200 friends were added in a staggered fashion to prevent suspicion.
Analysis:
Analysis is both qualitative and quantitative. General trends will be observed regarding mutual friends and interests. Actual quantitative data will be collected using available Facebook applications capable of analysis friend data.
We are creating false Facebook profiles to try and make "friends" by sending out 200 friend requests per account. There will be 4, a guy and girl account with detailed content and low privacy settings as well as a guy and a girl account with minimal content and very high privacy settings, and based on the number of adds and the people who add us, we will determine how much people really trust Facebook and the Internet.
