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Mark Zuckerberg Spends Time Predicting Who You'll Hook Up With Next

by Amar Toor on May 23, 2010 at 11:00 AM

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You may spend your spare time surfing the Web, hanging out with friends, or playing ultimate frisbee. Mark Zuckerberg spends his down time predicting who you're gonna hook up with next. That's right. Your romantic life is Zuckerberg's leisure.

In the forthcoming book 'The Facebook Effect,' Fortune columnist David Kirkpatrick delves into the psyche of the Facebook CEO. And based on early indications, it's a creepy, deranged place. All Facebook recently posted an excerpt from the book, in which Kirkpatrick describes Zuck's viscerally disturbing penchant for trying to predict which of his users will eventually do the dirty. As the author writes, Zuckerberg "concluded that by examining friend relationships and communications patterns he could determine with about 33 percent accuracy who a user was going to be in a relationship with a week from now." As part of his voyeuristic system, he "studied who was looking which [sic] profiles, who your friends were friends with, and who was newly single, among other indicators."

As Gawker points out, this kind of pattern-seeking behavior, to a certain extent, is part and parcel of the job, and Zuckerberg has even assembled a "data science" team to help him quantify user trends. The perplexing thing about this particular habit, though, is the fact that homeboy does it for fun. Everyone, of course, has their own "thing," and who doesn't like to indulge in a little guilty voyeuristic pleasure every now and then? The difference, though, is that not everyone is the CEO of the largest and most invasive social network in the world. The more we learn about the strange mechanisms that make Zuckerberg tick, the more Facebook's meddlesome approach to user privacy rights make total sense. [From: AllFacebook; via: Gawker]

Tags: behavior, ceo, creepy, dating, facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, MarkZuckerberg, patterns, relationships, romance, socialnetworking, top, web, Zuckerberg

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