Inside Facebook Data Mining Research Group 30
holy_calamity writes "Technology Review has an in depth profile of the team at Facebook tasked with figuring out what can be learned from all our data. The Data Science Team mine that information trove both in the name of scientific research into the patterns of human behavior and to advance Facebook's understanding of its users. Facebook's ad business gets the most public attention, but the company's data mining technology may have a greater effect on its destiny — and users lives."
TL;DR (Score:5, Informative)
I went against my intuition and read TFA. The whole 4,200 words of it.
It's a complete fluff piece and doesn't contain any interesting new knowledge regarding human behavior or social networks, which you would expect from an "in depth" article about Facebook's data mining.
There are some tidbits regarding old stuff (4 degrees of freedoms between "friends"), obvious stuff (93% of friends met in real life), and a bunch of other vaguely presented stuff with questionable validity.
Re:FB, stop telling everybody what I comment or li (Score:2, Informative)
Go whine on one of the hundred Facebook groups for this you nitwit, nobody here cares, Facebook doesn't care. If you don't like it, stop using it. End of story.
Re:And if you want to join their data science team (Score:2, Informative)
... Facebook is running an open call data science competition to win an interview/job on their data science team.
Anyone with half a brain will run away screaming from that offer, but not for the obvious reasons. A company that's recently post-IPO has mostly multimillionaires for employees -- and they can and will treat anyone who isn't like dirt. In a few years, if Facebook manages to turn around it's epic failure of an IPO (Well, from a business standpoint... Zuckerberg and his crew are still flush with cash) and grows their employee base by a significant amount, it may be worth considering.
But right now, it's a job for the kids fresh out of college; they won't know that the mistreatment isn't normal and might actually stick around for a couple of years before burning out.
I work at Facebook, and I can tell you that:
1) Most employees are not multimillionaires
2) I have been treated respectfully by everyone, from Zuck down, regardless of whether they are multi-millionaires, or hired last week
3) I work with data at Facebook. It's one of a handful of places on the planet with this rich of a data set
4) I'm not a kid fresh out of college and I've worked for a lot of companies in my career. The people I work with are the most talented I have met. I consider it a privilege to work with them.