THE CASE

The algoritomo that governs the contacts in the most popular social network recognizes our tastes, but our friends can not understand when someone "there". With tragic results from our correspondent ANGELO Aquaro

NEW YORK - A specter is haunting Facebook. On the contrary: there are hundreds of thousands of ghosts. They are our friends who are gone, and who - surprise? - Continue to ask us to contact the social forum's most famous and busiest in the world. Put that way it maybe sounds a bit 'macabre: but the ultimate dilemma of Facebook is just that. The social forum lives of algorithms: they are mathematical formulas that allow you to meet friends, tastes, hobbies, passions. There are formulas that are updated constantly by users. And here is the number one problem: until proven otherwise, the dead do not surf the Internet. And then toccherebbe to a family member or friend to notify the service to prevent the departure, in fact, that the ghost is perpetuating the web. The number two is a multiplication problem: with 500 million users, Facebook is among the most populous nations on Earth and then with a high mortality rate. Add to that the problem number three: that the proliferation on the social network of those over 65 who have almost tripled in the last year. What to do?

The issue is already dividing the nation was born and where Facebook has more members. And the case is finished on the New York Times has picked up the rant of un'internauta. "I was there at the computer when Facebook suggested I get in touch with an old family friend who had played piano at my wedding," says Courtney Puvin, 36 years, Texas. Too bad that his friend had died two months ago. "At first I felt shocked: it was like receiving a message from the dead. Then I felt offended by this lack of sensitivity on the part of the social forum. And finally, well, yes, basically I did almost see my friend so tenderly: unexpectedly. "

The experience is short between the macabre and science fiction. Too bad there are not at the cinema. "We know that seeing pop up in a dead friend might just be painful," says Meredith Chin Facebook. Professor James Katz of Reutgers Univeristy throws in sociology: "The site was created for children but is increasingly the territory of persons of a certain age."

Will. But aside from the fact that death, as they say, does not ask for ID card, the bitter irony of this whole story is that the question of how to manage profiles on Facebook for the deceased was born three years ago: the massacre at Virginia Tech college. Many boys had begged not to close the pages of the victims in order to continue to honor them on the web. So the social forum has launched its policy of "storage" at the request of family or friends of the missing pages of users can be stored without data to continue to end up in searches and materializziando faces ghost of his friend in the pop- up.
But the numbers are now the curse of the social forum that owes its success to the algorithms: the New York Times estimated that the relationship between users and employees of the site is 1 in 350 thousand. How do you check the accuracy of death certificates? He knows something that Thulbourn Simon, a German computer engineer that some prankster friend had given Facebook up for dead, and had to launch a web campaign to draw attention to the social forum. And finally reopen its page being closed for mourning.