Random Friends

Published on 2021-06-18 by Spencer Peters

In this global world, it's easy to lose track of even the closest of friends. But there is no excuse for a "See you in another life, brother" mentality. So, I decided to randomly choose a Facebook friend (every day?) and send them a message. The "Random Friends" project!

To do this, I downloaded a list of all my Facebook friends (how-to). Instead of just using random.org, I wrote a little class to load the friends, pick random friends, and log my actions. Probably overkill, but now I can do things like remove "friends" from the list if I don't know them at all.

The game plan is something like "Hey <Name>! Just thought of you (with the help of a random number generator... see cs.cornell.edu/~speters/random.friends.html). How's it going?" Let's give it a try... I'll post updates below!