I seek you: searching and matching individuals in social networks

The first task any individual faces after joining an online social network (OSN) is locating friends that are present on that particular site. Most OSNs offer some variation of a tool that imports email contact lists to facilitate the task of finding one's friends. However, given that OSNs attempt to reconnect individuals with past acquaintances, one might not have access to the email address for a long lost friend. Furthermore, people tend to utilize a number of aliases online, meaning that an email address cannot always be used to reliably find a friend. Thus, new members must still manually search for friends based on a number of biographical attributes, such as gender, age, hometown, etc. It is not clear, however, what attributes are useful for conducting the search. Even after the search has been performed, the person performing the search might be left with a number of candidate profiles. In this paper, we develop a system for searching and matching individuals in OSNs. We evaluate the efficacy of our person matching techniques by measuring the overlap between social networks, and comparing our results to those published by compete.com. We then look at several interesting properties of overlapping profiles in both networks.