Facebook is primarily meant to help you stay in touch with friends and family. The world’s largest social network is now running a test for a new feature which will display a label of things that you have in common with people you’re not connected to on Facebook. The company believes this will lead to more meaningful public discussions.
The label will mention the things that you have in common with a stranger on Facebook. For example, if both of you went to the same university, it will read “Went to the University of California,” for example. If they live close by, the label would say “From Phoenix, Arizona,” for example.
The social network does point out that these labels will only show the information that one can already find on someone’s profile. Anything that a user has set to private will remain hidden and won’t surface in these labels.
“Only information that people made publicly available on their profiles will be eligible to show up,” Facebook promises. It’s testing this feature with a small number of users in the United States right now. It depends on the response that it gets from this test whether or not Facebook will decide to deploy this feature to all users.
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