WhoIsJustLike.Me is a web site that compares the similarity between Facebook members based on their likes and interests.
After getting to WhoIsJustLike.Me, you are greeted by a gray rectangle with a “See my report” in the upper side. On mouse-over, the schematics of the report are revealed, with random pictures and question marks instead of numbers. The results of the report will be posted on Facebook by default, as soon as the report is generated. In case you do not want this to happen, you have to uncheck the “Share who is Just Like Me with my friends” box. As soon as you click on the button, you are taken to Facebook, where you have to allow the app the following permissions:
- Access my basic information
- Send me email
- Post to Facebook as me
- Access my Profile information
- Access information people share with me
Presuming that you allowed the app to access all this information, you will have to wait for a few seconds, while the report is generated. When the wait is over, you will see a report similar to the one from the image above. According to my report, I have a 100% match rate with a stranger with whom I share 14 common friends. Given the unreal percentage, I am left to wonder if I have been cloned already. The way this match rate is calculated may be similar to the one used by StumbleUpon, where if A is x% similar to B, the other way around might imply y%, but not even there I did not find a 100% match. A list of common interests that both I and my match share, including favorite musicians, films and activities, is also displayed. Besides my “clone”, there are also listed four of my Facebook friends, along with their respective match rate. According to the report, the average Facebook member has 38.9 interests, 14.3 bands and musicians, 7.5 movies and 6 TV shows. In my case, only the number of interests is listed (421+) and in what concerns the other areas, I seem to be off the charts.
Not at last, I find the numbers to be inconsistent. On the web site, you are given the possibility to post to Twitter the results of the report. In my case, the tweet was “Just Like Me: X is most like me (80%) after analyzing 1,747,625 people and 65 million interests. See your report: [link].” As seen in the above picture, the results are supposed to be based on the analysis of 1,795,885 Facebook users and friends. Inconsistency apart, last time I checked, Facebook had 800+ million members, so there certainly is a lot of room for improvement there. Moreover, the tweet mentions 65 million interests, while in the footnote there are 95,432,758. I’m willing to place a bet that the real number of interests on Facebook exceeds 100 million by a large margin. While WhoIsJustLike.Me might be a good way of making new friends based on a relative similarity, I do not think that it should be taken very seriously.
If you liked this post, please check the location-based dating service offered by OKCupid and Alyssa Bereznak’s OKCupid adventure.
