Currently FF's recommendations suffer from what Greg Linden calls "the Harry Potter" problem. The fact that everybody in the world has bought Harry Potter or is subscribed to Scoble is not a valid reason for recommending them to me. Instead recommendations should be based on what's unique or different from the norm within my immediate social netowrk - Adewale Oshineye

Maybe an "ignore list" would help? Add "Harry Potter" to it and have related friends' posts filtered out. Technically this would be not so easy, though: keyword matching is not quite sufficient. - 9000

Great point, Philipp! What I'd really prefer is for FF to notice and act upon my own implicit preferences; whose items do I tend to comment on more? Like more? And... one degree out... which other FFers exhibit similar tastes? - Adam Lasnik

To be clear, the tab suggests friends that are popular among your friends, not topics or phenomenon. This makes sense because if you're trying to broaden your social circle it helps point out people on the periphery of that circle. It could perhaps be made smarter by giving stronger weight to symmetrical links (diminishing the Scoble factor), but if you're looking for someone totally outside your social sphere then perhaps browsing the public list is a good place to start, much as walking randomly through the library is a better way to encounter new points of view than asking your friends for recommendations. - Kevin Fox

If you truly want different perspectives, you should be able to find them in your friends or at least your friend's friends. I've really enjoyed several of the people/ feeds I have found through FOAF, particularly Chris White. Whoever you are, you rock. - Clare Dibble

Kevin, based on your comment perhaps you could add a "And here's 6 semi-random guys" feature at the bottom of the Suggestions page (perhaps with 2 or 3 of their latest items). Those could be picked almost randomly while making sure they're from quite a distance of your current network. Some suggestions could also be picked based on people having a lot of comments to their items which however never made it to my Friendfeed page. Sort of as a way to find out about hot discussions you might be missing out on. - Philipp Lenssen

[continued] And to more quickly know whether or not you'd like to subscribe to a person, and as a general feature which might make sense here, a one-line description to each person below their image/ on their page might make sense (like "John Doe from San Francisco works as designer at Yahoo and won the national snooker championship in 1999"). - Philipp Lenssen

Philipp, for the sake of argument, what about the perspective of those '6 random guys'? It seems to me that there's something to be said for growing the social graph organically. Some users (especially the non-digirati majority) might not like having their life stream (forgive me for using the term) recommended to total strangers for their perusal and comment. I'm not sure that checking 'public' should be equated with wanting to have FF promote you to strangers to grow your social graph randomly... - Kevin Fox

I'm curious whether the FF people are at all excited about using Fancy Pants Algorithms to suggest and recommend and filter based on historical data and the social graph. "Yes" -> I think you want something quite different from the current friend recommender. "No" -> the friend recommender is more to jog your memory and give you clickables than to show you new datastreams. Either way, I don't think adding "and here's 5 randoms" to the list is going in a very useful direction. - ⓞnor

Kevin, if this about privacy, then you could also just include those who allow non-approved subscribers (though if it is about privacy, as you mention, the public feeds page can already be used to find random people). My subscriptions here have not grown completely naturally, as they were heavily seeded with Friendfeed creators being [to be continued] - Philipp Lenssen

default suggestions. Which is half the fun here (terrific seeding or what you may call it) but also brings growing risks of echo chamber effects. Perhaps this is half-way connected to that "other" issue (starts with "d.." but I don't wanna get into it again ;) ). - Philipp Lenssen

Just to clarify, my comment wasn't about privacy in the access control sense, but rather privacy in the user experience sense. A user who signs up with some friends and family and who wants to foster organic growth along the edge of their social sphere might not appreciate a site that actively encourages total strangers to subscribe to them and inject themselves into the conversation. It's not a matter of whether it's possible or allowed for the user to do so, but the degree to which it actually happens. You might choose not to wear headphones on an airplane because you're fine with a stranger in the next seat striking up a conversation with you, but that doesn't mean you want the flight attendants to make an announcement that the person in seat 17C is worth talking to. - Kevin Fox

Kevin, I understand your argument, in fact it's one that can be raised against Friendfeed's imaginary friends setting, in a way (as that feature gets rid of privacy through obscurity, if you believe in that concept in the first place -- even when these people "took off the ear phones" by signing up to these other sites, they may not have realized there's a flight attendant bundling and announcing their actions to strangers on other sites). [Edited at 23:54 CET :)] - Philipp Lenssen

As far as I know (and I'll double-check) imaginary friends are never recommended to users. Also, I think there's a difference between strangers viewing your content (which can happen whenever you have a public feed on any service) and strangers incorporating themselves into the conversation between you and people in your social circle. Both are important considerations, but my earlier comments were more concerned with the latter case. - Kevin Fox