http://www.peertopatent.org/patent/72/prior_art/list A method and system for recommending potential contacts to a target user is provided. A recommendation system identifies users who are related to the target user through no more than a maximum degree of separation. The recommendation system identifies the users by starting with the contacts of the target user and identifying users who are contacts of the target user's contacts, contacts of those contacts, and so on. The recommendation system then ranks the identified users, who are potential contacts for the target user, based on a likelihood that the target user will want to have a direct relationship with the identified users. The recommendation system then presents to the target user a ranking of the users who have not been filtered out. en-us Recommending contacts in a social network Title: Proceedings of the eleventh ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery in data minin<br/>ISBN: 1-59593-135-X <br/>Description: A personal profile, called CommunityNet, is established for each individual based on a novel algorithm incorporating contact, content, and time information simultaneously. It can be used for personal social capital management. Clusters of CommunityNets provide a view of informal networks for organization management. Our new algorithm is developed based on the combination of dynamic algorithms in the social network field and the semantic content classification methods in the natural language processing and machine learning literatures. Wed, 02 Jul 2008 15:20:16 -0700 http://www.peertopatent.org/prior_art/215/detail Recommending contacts in a social network Title: Development and Evaluation of a Virtual Community<br/>ISBN: <br/>Description: The Circle of Friends (1999) as implemented on Llantrisant Online (2001) allows users to add friends manually and recommends 'friends' from genealogical data, increasing their reputation when they add them. Fri, 09 May 2008 09:57:54 -0700 http://www.peertopatent.org/prior_art/191/detail Recommending contacts in a social network Title: Social Information Filtering: Algorithms for Automating &quot;Word of Mouth’’<br/>ISBN: <br/>Description: This paper describes a technique for making personalized recommendations from any type of database to a user based on similarities between the interest profile of that user and those of other users. Sun, 27 Apr 2008 22:18:28 -0700 http://www.peertopatent.org/prior_art/185/detail Recommending contacts in a social network Title: Personal Privacy: The Yenta Multi-Agent Distributed Matchmaking System<br/>ISBN: <br/>Description: Lenny Foner's PhD thesis on Yenta describes a privacy-aware matchmaking system based on the contents of a user's profile. The thesis caps much of the work, some published some not, of Pattie Maes's group at the MIT Media Lab during the mid-1990s. I would argue that this group's work pre-dates and was a superset of much of the social network tools now popular. Foner's thesis provides pointers to much of this Sun, 27 Apr 2008 21:48:20 -0700 http://www.peertopatent.org/prior_art/182/detail Recommending contacts in a social network Title: Discover People You May Know<br/>Description: The system for recommending names on Facebook can be considered prior art under some circumstances. This is the same as described above with one difference: Facebook uses a k of 2 (everyone that is 2 degrees from the user, or one degree from the user's friends). In this patent application the value of k can vary to different maximum degrees of separation. Since k is a tweakable parameter, I would say that Facebook's present system IS prior art. (You can view this when selecting find friends and looking at the list under “Discover people you may already know”. Sun, 27 Apr 2008 19:48:44 -0700 http://www.peertopatent.org/prior_art/181/detail