Facebook offers friend recommendations, another way to keep itself relevant

Facebook, one of the world’s largest social networking sites, is testing out a feature called “People You May Know,” that shows you the public profiles of people it figures you want to be Facebook friends with.

This seems like a smart feature to add. Every Facebook user has friends who they didn’t know were on the site. So helping these friend connections happen nearly automatically means Facebook becomes even more central to keeping track of all of your social relationships.

Presumably, the Palo Alto, Calif. company is determining people who you may know based on shared relationships in your social graph, as well as contacts imported from your email addresses and instant messaging lists.

A number of other web companies offer variations of this service, such as LinkedIn’s.

David Adewumi, a contributing writer with VentureBeat, is the founder & CEO of http://heekya.com a social storytelling platform billed “The Wikipedia of Stories.”