ReadWriteWeb

We've just discovered an awesome new feature that Facebook is using to experiment with friend request confirmation pages.

When you confirm a new friend, you'll be presented with four people that friend is connected to - four suggestions for people who might be mutual acquaintances based on your social graph. It's more useful and more accurate than the current friend/fan suggestion feature, and we actually like it a lot. Check out the screenshots, or try it for yourself the next time someone friend requests you.

A while back, a friend of mine wondered about LinkedIn's somewhat limited options for indicating how you know someone. ("I vomited on their shoes at the office party" isn't on the list, for example.) We had a back-and-forth on her blog, and I came up with a list of some potentially useful additions to LinkedIn's categories.

You'll find them below... but they're only a starting point. Kindly add yours in the comments, and maybe - just maybe - they'll be coming soon to a form field near you.

Between self-aggrandizing FriendFeeds, bottom-feeding link baiters, and perpetual Twitter spammers, finding cool online friends can be challenging. Michael G. Noll and Ching-man Au Yeung created the SPEAR (SPamming-resistant Expertise Analysis and Ranking) algorithm in the hopes of separating the social media wheat from the chaff. This morning the two postgraduate students offered their findings to Delicious in a blog post. The project was first evaluated using data sets collected from the popular bookmarking community.

According to Cameron Marlow, Facebook's "in-house sociologist," that number is four if you are male and six if you are female. As the Economist reports this morning, Marlow's research indicates that the average Facebook user has a network of about 120 friends, but only has two-way conversations with a very small subset of these 'friends.' Interestingly, even for those users who have a far larger number of friends (500+), those numbers barely grow (ten for men and sixteen for women).

Recently, we told you about Glue, a new browser plugin from AdaptiveBlue that put the social web in context by letting friends share music, movies, books, and other sorts of things. Unlike social networks dedicated to these items, like Goodreads, Flixster, or Last.fm, which keeps the information isolated from the rest of your web activity, Glue pops up in your browser when you're actively viewing a book, movie, album, etc. Today, you can extend the functionality of Glue by also installing the new iPhone application.