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Collaborative Filtering (CF) based recommender systems often suffer from the sparsity problem, particularly for new and inactive users when they use the system. The emerging trend of social networking sites and their accommodation in other sites like e-commerce can potentially help alleviate the sparsity problem with their provided social relation data. In this paper, we have particularly explored a new kind of social relation, the membership, and its combined effect with friendship. The two type of heterogeneous social relations are fused into the CF recommender via a factorization process. Due to the two relations' respective properties, we adopt different fusion strategies: regularization was leveraged for friendship and collective matrix factorization (CMF) was proposed for incorporating membership. We further developed a unified model to combine the two relations together and tested it with real large-scale …