Courtney Purvin got a shock when she visited Facebook last month. The site was suggesting that she get back in touch with an old family friend who played piano at her wedding four years ago.Read the rest here.
The friend had died in April.
“It kind of freaked me out a bit,” she said. “It was like he was coming back from the dead.”
Facebook, the world’s biggest social network, knows a lot about its roughly 500 million members. Its software is quick to offer helpful nudges about things like imminent birthdays and friends you have not contacted in a while. But the company has had trouble automating the task of figuring out when one of its users has died.
That can lead to some disturbing or just plain weird moments for Facebook users as the site keeps on shuffling a dead friend through its social algorithms.
Saturday, July 17, 2010
Facebook: Coping with death on the social network
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1 comment:
i was astonished this week to see that a friend had befriended someone who died in March. I immediately sent her a message asking her how she did that - so far no response.
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