Suggesting deals to a user in a social networking system

Abstract

A social networking system suggests deals relevant to a user. The deals are selected for suggestion based on social information associated with the user. Social information used for selecting candidate deals for a user includes information describing other users connected to the user and their associations with the candidate deals or with related deals, for example, deals from the same provider. Associations of connections of the user with the candidate deals may be determined based on actions associated with the candidate deals performed by the connections. The actions performed by the connections may be weighted based on types of the actions to determine a measure of relevance of the candidate deal for the user. Candidate deals are selected from a set of deals by applying deal targeting criteria received from deal providers. The deal targeting criteria specify attributes describing users to be targeted for a particular deal.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.