The request is harvesting data from Facebook. For users with a tremendous amount of data, batch requests must be made, so it can take a while sometimes.
Here at GraphMuse (invite engine for Facebook apps), we hadn't heard of a "Growth Engineer" until we really looked into some of the people interested in our product.
Turns out that Growth Engineers are actually respected "higher-ups." You said it yourself too. That said, I think few people are familiar with this job title outside of SV.
Was it Facebook who started this trend?
NOTE: I'd increase the line spacing on your blog, it's a bit tight.
We thought about licensing it, and we'd probably feel comfortable doing so. However, the infrastructure required to run this is pretty intense and customized. We're actually pushing a patent for the infrastructure/technology behind it.
Facebook provides you the user's list of friends, and each friend's list of mutual friends with the user. From there, we construct the friend graph, and then run our clustering algorithm on it.
You're right about Facebook not providing friends of friends. Supposedly they used to back in the day, but not anymore.
I have some ideas that are worth developing. In fact, we were using GraphMuse originally to determine entire fraternities and sororities. We listed 3,400 Greeks at UPenn in 3 weeks.
Regarding security, good point. SSL is supported; however, we are still in the process of obtaining a secure certificate signed by a CA. Most browsers would not let the demo run SSL over AJAX so we have it temporarily disabled, but once we get a certificate, we will re-enable the SSL support for the API. At that point, one simply has to use https instead of http for API calls.
This is a great point, and I respect your skepticism.
At this point, we're in the process of confirming our hypothesis with case studies.
We did launch this clustering algorithm for our previous venture, Greekdex.com, in which we determined entire fraternities and sororities given just one user's friend graph. Clusters were "completed" over time as more users signed up.
That said, it's obvious that members in fraternities and sororities tell their fellow brothers and sisters about the site that they just signed up for. Therefore, it's difficult to say that our clustering algorithm resulted in more users signing up.
tldr; we're working on confirming our hypothesis with case studies.
Do you view the invites you receive as complete spam? I guess it might depend on the size of your college, and how open the college is to parties, events, etc.