Can Facebook Tell If Your Relationship Is Doomed?

Our geeks in thick-rimmed glasses and white overcoats are at it again as they have published a study which claims that Facebook is able to tell if your relationship is doomed.

: Facebook could be able to tell if your relationship is doomedKamal Zharif / Foter.com / CC BY

N0w as you will know, Facebook knows everything about you. This also includes the things you tell it. Eg, geeks related to these ones in one way or another can tell what is going on in your life and loads about your personality simply based on your statuses, the types of photos you put up and the thinks you ‘Like’.

Now research, from Cornell University’s Jon Kleinberg and Facebook engineer Lars Backstrom, analyzed 1.3 million random Facebook users who listed a spouse or significant other in their profile.

Each person had between 50 and 20,000 friends. The researchers were able to develop an algorithm that could figure out who a Facebooker was married to 60 percent of the time based on a metric called dispersion—the degree to which a couple’s mutual friends are not connected to one another. Higher dispersion, they found, was a stronger predictor of a relationship than just the number of mutual friends two people share. “A spouse or romantic partner is a bridge between a person’s different social worlds,” Kleinberg explained to the New York Times.

Now cop this:

When they could not predict the relationship, the couple was doomed anyway. So they were on a ‘transition to single status’.