Facebook is a good way of finding your family, old school friends, work friends, pub friends, that person you randomly spoke to once while on a training day… almost anyone really.
Sending a friend request suggests you want to connect (or reconnect) with that person. There are various things I’ve noticed with the art of “friending” people – not saying I necessarily do these, but I know people who do:
- denying a friend is rejection
- repeatedly requesting a friend who denies you is irritating but it might get them to add you in the end
- never approving or denying someone means you can leave them in limbo, and not have to make a choice
- approving anyone and everyone could be problematic if you post things on Facebook that some of those people shouldn’t see – would you share the same things with your family or colleagues that you’d share with your partner or your friends?
- removing a friend is the ultimate rejection – and even someone with loads of friends may notice you removed them
So how about this. A friend request is approved, let’s say between a couple of old friends. Both people check into Facebook fairly often, and they reply to comments from other friends. One of the old friends tries to initiate a chat by sending a message or posting on the other person’s wall, and they don’t get a reply. OK, no worries, they try again another day. And again. And still there’s no response.
Why approve someone whose comments you ignore?
I bet if one of the two severed the link by removing the other person from Facebook, the person being removed would notice, and re-request.
Yes, it’s silly and not very important, but why approve someone you don’t want to talk to?
What do you think?
About Ben
Facebook keeps me in limbo. They froze my account until I provide them with my drivers license. (which I will never do, they are already an identity fraud nightmare). Now I can’t log in to even delete my account. This is why I prefer twitter. First time I’m spammed to join their mafia war, I delete them from my list of friends.
Facebook is the bane of my existence. I am getting over an ugly addiction to their game applications. At this point I have deleted and blocked all but a couple of them. You must actually block them or you keep getting requests from people even though you deleted the game from your list of applications.
I much prefer Twitter as a communication thing. Yet, I like seeing my blog posts show up in my Facebook feed. I get the odd comment there from people who may or may not actually go to my blog itself.
The friend thing is crazy there. I don’t remember who most of those people are. When I went through and deleted over a thousand people about a year ago I was amazed at how much I found on Facebook of real people versus game junk. Now I am back in the flood of game junk. I let relatives link to me there and some of them are playing a lot of those games. I think they must be on there 20 out of 24 hours in the day. So I am caught trying to filter the junk out and yet not make anyone feel I am less than friendly.
On the other hand, I have met three people I really like through playing those stupid games on Facebook. I don’t know if they have ever gone to my blog but we talk on Facebook.
Did I mention Facebook is evil?