Recommending a group to a user of a social networking system based on affinities of the user for members of the group

A computer program product comprising a non-transitory computer readable storage medium having instructions encoded therein that, when executed by a processor, cause the processor to:

• maintain information at a social networking system describing a plurality of groups, each group having a plurality of members and each member being a user of the social networking system;
• identify an opportunity to suggest, to a viewing user of the social networking system, that the viewing user join one or more of the plurality of groups;
• determine a candidate set of groups from the plurality of groups, where the viewing user is not a member of any of the candidate set of groups;
• predict an affinity between the viewing user and each of one or more of the candidate set of groups;
• selecting a group from the candidate set of groups, where the viewing user has at least a threshold predicted affinity for the selected group;
• retrieve information associated with one or more members of the selected group;
• compute an affinity score of the viewing user for each of the one or more members of the selected group based at least in part on one or more stored connections between the viewing user and the one or more members of the selected group;
• rank the one or more members of the selected group based on the computed affinity scores;
• select a set of the one or more members of the selected group based at least in part on the ranking;
• generate a recommendation for the viewing user to join the selected group, the recommendation comprising an arrangement of one or more images associated with each of the selected set of members of the selected group overlaying at least a portion of an image associated with the group, the images arranged within the recommendation based on the ranking;
• and
• send the recommendation for display to the viewing user.

A method comprising:

• maintaining information at a social networking system describing a plurality of groups, each group having a plurality of members and each member being a user of the social networking system;
• identifying an opportunity to suggest, to a viewing user of the social networking system, that the viewing user join one or more of the plurality of groups;
• determining a candidate set of groups from the plurality of groups, where the viewing user is not a member of any of the candidate set of groups;
• predicting an affinity between the viewing user and each of one or more of the candidate set of groups;
• selecting a group from the candidate set of groups, where the viewing user has at least a threshold predicted affinity for the selected group;
• retrieving information associated with one or more members of the selected group;
• computing an affinity score of the viewing user for each of the one or more members of the selected group based at least in part on the retrieved information associated with one or more members of the selected group and information associated with the viewing user;
• selecting a set of the one or more members of the selected group based at least in part on the computed affinity scores;
• and
• generating a recommendation for the viewing user to join the selected group, the recommendation comprising an arrangement of one or more images associated with each of the selected set of members of the selected group overlaying at least a portion of an image associated with the group, the images arranged within the recommendation based on the computed affinity scores.

A method comprising:

• maintaining information at a social networking system describing a plurality of groups, each group having a plurality of members and each member being a user of the social networking system;
• determining a candidate set of groups to suggest that the viewing user join, the candidate set of groups selected from the plurality of groups, where the viewing user is not a member of any of the candidate set of groups;
• predicting an affinity between the viewing user and each of one or more of the candidate set of groups;
• selecting a group from the candidate set of groups, where the viewing user has at least a threshold predicted affinity for the selected group;
• computing an affinity score of the viewing user for each of the one or more members of the selected group based at least in part on one or more stored connections between the viewing user and the one or more members of the selected group;
• ranking the one or more members of the selected group based on the computed affinity scores;
• selecting a set of the one or more members of the selected group based at least in part on the ranking;
• generating a recommendation for the viewing user to join the selected group, the recommendation comprising an arrangement of one or more images associated with each of the selected set of members of the selected group arranged within the recommendation based on the ranking;
• and
• sending the recommendation for display to the viewing user.