Patent ID: 8898239

Claim:
A computer-implemented method of passively populating a list of participants of an electronic communications system, the method comprising the following operations performed by at least one processor: maintaining, on a computer memory storage system, a participant list of users of an electronic communications system to be used by a user of the electronic communications system, wherein the participant list includes at least one user of the electronic communications system who was selected for inclusion in the participant list by the user, and further wherein the user is identified by multiple identities on the electronic communications system; determining that the user knows multiple users who are not already included in the participant list; as a consequence of determining that the user knows multiple users who are not already included in the participant list, identifying, as candidates for addition to the participant list, multiple of the users who were determined to be known by the user but who are not already included in the participant list; determining a communications strength between each of the multiple identities of the user on the electronic communications system and each of the identified candidates, the determining of the communications strength including determining degrees of separation between each of the multiple identities of the user and each of the identified candidates; combining the determined communications strengths for each of the multiple identities to obtain an overall communications strength between the user and each of the identified candidates; for each of the identified candidates, comparing the overall communications strength between the user and that candidate with the overall communications strength between the user and each of the other identified candidates; and based on results of comparing the overall communications strengths to each other, designating, for addition to the participant list, a group of identified candidates having higher overall communications strengths than others of the identified candidates, the group of identified candidates having the smallest degrees of separation from the user, the designating including: accessing a maximum allowable number of users that may be added to the participants list, and selecting, for addition to the participant list, a number of users that have the highest communications strengths, the number of users selected being not greater than the maximum allowable number of users that may be added to the participant list.