Facebook Knows if a Relationship is Doomed

Facebook knows everything. The social-networking site has enough information about its users to predict if a romantic relationship is about to end.

Specifically, the study found that the strong ties within mutual friends are detrimental to the relationship.

The study, conducted by Jon Kleinberg from Cornell University and Lars Backstrom, engineer at Facebook, was based on data from 1.3 million random Facebook users. Researchers looked at the levels of interconnectedness within the couple's mutual friends.

Data analysis showed that couples with high dispersion rate- loosely connected mutual friends- had higher chances of having a healthy relationship than people who had mutual friends who were interconnected.

In other words, being friends with different sets of people can help the couple enjoy their personal space and stay rooted in the relationship.

"Instead of embededness, we propose that the link between and an individual u and v his or her partner should display a 'dispersed' structure: the mutual neighbours of u and v are not well connected to one another and hence u and v act jointly as the only intermediaries between these different parts of the network," researchers wrote.

The experts designed an algorithm that helped them analyze the strength of a relationship based on number of mutual friends. They were also able to identify a user's partner.

"A spouse or romantic partner is a bridge between a person's different social worlds," Mr. Kleinberg said, news.com.au reported.

The study team will be presenting the research at a conference in February.                         

Previous research has shown that Facebook is addictive, sometimes even more than sex and that not being on the site is seen as being a threat to the society. Other studies have associated Facebook use with anxiety, debt and even higher weight.  A recent study from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences had shown that Facebook profile can reveal a user's personality.