(Credit: CNET)
It might be possible to tell from looking at Facebook whether a relationship is going to last, researchers say.
And, they add, clues on the social-networking site may reveal whom you’re dating even if you don’t broadcast your relationship status.
In a recent study, Lars Backstrom, a senior engineer at Facebook, and Jon Kleinberg, a computer scientist at Cornell University, started off with this question (PDF): “Given all the connections among a person’s friends, can you recognize his or her romantic partners from the network structure alone?”
To determine the connection and potential romantic links, the researchers created a new measurement they call “dispersion.” They define dispersion as “the extent to which two people’s mutual friends are not themselves well-connected.”
Let’s say you met your significant other in college. All of your mutual friends would likely also be friends with each other, because you were all well connected then. You would have a lower dispersion score.
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