Anecdotes from the Blogosphere
I have heard some anecdotal evidence of this phenomenon, both from word of mouth and from internet sources outlined below in screenshots:
The Experiment
But how can we confirm this phenomenon exists? I set up a little experiment.
I had a friend name Vicky use my fake Facebook profile “Irwin” to visit her own Facebook profile. We were looking for (1) whether this would trigger Irwin to show up on Vicky’s People You May Know (“PYMK”) list (2) if it does trigger, how many views of Vicky’s profile would it take to make it happen. So after about 20 attempts using the Irwin profile to view Vicky’s page, we still couldn’t get Irwin to show up on PYMK.
So it’s easy to dismiss the negative results here – I was using a fake profile Irwin with only 1 friend, but the other possibility is that Irwin and Vicky were logging in and out from the same IP address. So Facebook might have some flags along those lines. So I asked Vicky to repeat the experiment, but this time log Irwin in through a proxy to guarantee a different IP address when he’s visiting Vicky’s page. But even so, we still couldn’t reproduce the PYMK phenomenon.