Two questions about Facebook
When is it OK to ask someone to be your friend ? I don't
want to put someone else in the position of having to say "I don't -want- to be your friend" . I have been asked to be a friend of people I have
not even emailed - they are "cold calls" for friendship from within the
company. I don't know what to do with these. I like to have at least
known the person virtually before I befriend them. But there is no way
I could have told them this before they asked to be my friend. I am
also not looking to abandon my arbitrary criterion for facebook
friendship (prior email or real contact).
This makes me wonder about the friend requests I am sending out. I
look for cues about who wants to be contacted. That person whose
profile is private and has no picture - best not to send her a friend
request. Oh, look she uploaded a picture, so now I -can- send her a
friend request (even though it is a picture of her throwing her hands
in front of her face -not- wanting her picture taken). Are we evolving
a sophisticated mechanism of communicating the level of contact we
want with our friends ? [parenthetically: Maybe none of this matters, because
the annoying people from your high school will be least adept at
interpreting your signs anyways...:)]. I also look at the number of friends that someone has. Some one with three hundred friends is not likely to be upset if one more peripheral acquaintance requsts facebook-friendship. I look at the kinds of friends someone has. For instance, I carefully refrained from asking my high school age nieces and nephews to be my friends - all their 200 other friends are other high school kids. (Turns out they sent me friend requests !)
While there are mechanisms that allow me to control what people see of
my facebook deeds, it involves the creation of dry lists, that may work
well enough for objective criterion like a list of freinds who live in
boston, but the idea of pulling together lists that carve up my friends
along subjective dimensions like tolerance for bad humor seem daunting,
tiring and somewhat distasteful. Besides, doing this would remove the
element of whimsy from an app like facebook. One of its benefits is
that it lets you see things about your friends that you do not at the
moment have an avenue to see or share. Perhaps all this list making
will take away from that.
I see some intelligence built into how facebook provides it activity
feed - but leaving what various people are seeing about me to an
algorithm that takes into account my facebook patterns seems scary and
Orwellian.
And now for question two. After unintentionally sending sheep or
merkats or whatever to your entire friends list, are you now more
likely to read the text in a popup dialog? If tested, will facebook
users prove to be more likely to read the text in popup dialogs that
others?
