[tibbon]

Hmm, I'm not entirely sure I understand the "assimilation score". My partner Sarah is at the top, which makes sense, but then some people I barely know (brother of an ex, etc) are like #3 and 4, even though we only have two mutual friends. I have approximately 1,000 friends on FB... so maybe that's broken something?

[ericdykstra]

Similar questions here, and I have much fewer Facebook friends (around 350). My wife is #1, and it's not even close (66560 compared to #2, who is 8145).

But after that, I have a few people I don't care at all about in my top 10 (I'm thinking of just removing 3-4 of them now that I see that they're still my friends), and a couple of my closest friends have a score of 1.

[liuhenry]

From the linked paper [1], it looks like the scores are calculated based on a concept of "dispersion", which is how closely a particular individual in your network is connected to each of the separate clusters of people you know.

Each of the clusters in the graph represents a "social foci", such as co-workers, high school classmates, college classmates, etc.

The dispersion score calculates how well someone you know is connected to these multiple disjoint clusters of people in your life, and tries to show that the person with the highest score is most likely to be your romantic partner.

This probably doesn't work so well in trying to identify friends, since it's likely that a close friend from college may not know any of your friends from work, or your high school classmates.

1 - http://arxiv.org/pdf/1310.6753v1.pdf

[silencio]

I think this had a field day with my disparate groups of ~300 friends/family. I have two huge clusters of school vs work, with school split into high school vs college, and 4 smaller, fuzzier clusters of other groups (gamers, irc buddies, 2x family). My husband came in first with a score of 1310000+ with our roommate second at 343000+.

Most of the next 20 people or so (scores >30k) are people we invited to our wedding that we found out later friended others that attended our wedding, or are people part of multiple groups (tech people that I game with). I'm not sure I'd call these people more central to my life just because they're more social though, after a point.

[waterlesscloud]

Number 1 is my brother, which makes sense. He knows many different groups of my friends.

Number 2 is a friend who's a movie producer, ie a professional friendmaker. He's got a zillion friends.

After that it's kind of random.

Three of the women I've actually dated are literally at the bottom of the list. Makes sense, several times I've dated completely out of my circles. Funny to see though.

What's weird is that one of those women's friends, who I otherwise don't know at all, is near the top. Well above the woman I actually dated. We have no other friends in common. Interesting.

[dangle]

Same here. Top three are partner, mother and sister. Makes sense. 4 is someone I haven't talked to in 8 years and barely know.