The focus of the work discussed thus far has been on recommending familiar people one can connect to. As already implied, there could also be value in recommending people the user does not know. StrangerRS \cite{Guy_2011} attempted to recommend people who are unknown yet interesting within the organization. Such recommendations can be useful in many potential manners, such as, for getting help or advice, reach new opportunities, discover new routes for career development, learn about new assets that can be leveraged, connect with subject-matter experts and influencers, cultivate one’s organizational social capital, and grow own reputation and influence within the organization. As already mentioned before, recommendation of people to connect to within an SNS is mostly effective for the network-building phase. Afterwards one’s recommendations become staler, as the network becomes more stable and connection to others becomes less frequent. This is where stranger recommendation can become more relevant and complement the recommendation of familiar individuals, by suggesting interesting people the user does not know, but may want to start getting acquainted with.
Figure \ref{fig:fig13} shows the user interface of StrangerRS. Since it aimed at recommending strangers, more information about each person was presented, in the form of their full profile page (part A). Evidence for why this person may be interesting was also presented (part B). It included similarity points with that individual, such as common tags, common communities, common files, and others. The action suggested by the recommender was no longer a connection within the SNS, since it is likely to be too soon to connect to a stranger, but rather it was suggested to view the person’s profile, read their blog, or follow them (part C).