Facebook Friends ?

I don’t think I know any of these people.

And I so prefer flickr’s asymmetric model, whereby friend links are not necessarily bilateral. I don’t mind if some random people want to see my fB wall, but I don’t want to slog through updates from a ton of folks I don’t know. Other than making everything public, I don’t see a way of doing one-way friend links on Facebook.

So… grab a bottle of beer and sing along now:

99 facebook friends on the wall,
99 facebook friends!
Take one down, and pass it around —
399 facebook friends on the wall!

31 responses to “Facebook Friends ?”

Deadhead Daisy

Jun 5, 2009 at 1:48 am

fB is watching you….

Reply
!MimosaMicheMichelle!

Jun 5, 2009 at 2:15 am

I use Facebook at a minimum and also keep my "friends" to a minimum. I insist on having an account there and elsewhere to protect my identity because some people have used other people’s names as their own. We need not use Facebook that much. Flickr is so much better for photos and for making contacts and friends. There is more depth and sincerity here.

Reply
McPHX

Jun 5, 2009 at 2:22 am

I Agree… I’d bet that your inbox is filled with application generated email as well. I’ve stripped all the add-ons and junk apps off of my FB account and its still a mess.

Reply
Resh B.

Jun 5, 2009 at 2:25 am

399 Friend requests. Holy cow! No wonder my friend request is still pending! 🙂

Reply
complexify.

Jun 5, 2009 at 2:45 am

The asymmetric "friending" of Flickr and Twitter is indeed so much more flexible. I wish Facebook had a way to opt out of all application requests. I have 7 outstanding "(lil) green patch requests" alone, plus a "christmas ornament request" (slightly out of season!).

Reply
Leino88

Jun 5, 2009 at 2:45 am

fitting lyrics!

Reply
goodeye03 (Rich)

Jun 5, 2009 at 3:28 am

I don’t feel the need to be friends , unless you want to. But I do enjoy viewing your part of this world. I find your photos to be very interesting and enlightening.
I have alot of people who come along and add me as a friend whom never once make a comment about what I post. To me that is very rude.
I’m constantly being asked to be added as a friend on fB and I don’t remember half of them. So I understand what you are saying.
So if you don’t mind I’ll just sit back and check out some of the cool shit you get into and wish i could do the same. Do to life’s unknown changes, I can’t get into much anymore.
So keep living your dream.

Rich

Reply
Duncan Rawlinson – Duncan.co

Jun 5, 2009 at 3:36 am

Similar screenshot I took a while back:

Zombie invitations! 🙂

Reply
AGrinberg

Jun 5, 2009 at 4:12 am

"entrepreneurish invitation"?

How can you resist?

Reply
juhanharm

Jun 5, 2009 at 5:45 am

you can create one-way links on facebook. you can opt out from updates by hiding persons (next to contact name on the update page there is drop-down menu). works for applications also

it is a little annoying to hide persons and apps that way, but it works. i think the question is, is it worth the effort? making profile visible is probably easier

Reply
Todd Huffman

Jun 5, 2009 at 7:00 am

I get very suspicious of people who I have a high degree of interconnectivity with… but have NEVER encountered in any other setting. If you know 30 of my friends and I don’t know you, then you probably are wildly out of control.

I try to include a personal note in each invitation I send, unless I obviously know the person. More isn’t better.

Reply
TomiTapio

Jun 5, 2009 at 11:01 am

Also, some of the Facebook and Twitter accounts are spammers, trying to promote their business anonymously.

Reply
POOLEworks | roger

Jun 5, 2009 at 12:09 pm

Best link on the page… Ignore All.

Reply
dark_johnson

Jun 5, 2009 at 1:37 pm

As a rule, I ignore ALL FB apps – and try to only friend people I really know.

The Ignore function is awesome, the HIDE function is great.

It would be nice to be able to make some friendships not show up on your public friends list. I have a few friends who would love that.

Perhaps it’s being worked on?

Reply
!MimosaMicheMichelle!

Jun 5, 2009 at 3:15 pm

As I said before and as others have said, getting the least involved with various apps and functions in Facebook, hiding lists and making certain things accessible to only a few is best. Life is already too complicated to get it more complicated by a silly thing like Facebook.

In Flickr, everyone can see your photos so you get a large number of anonymous visitors. This is more discreet and simple for everyone, including you. Facebook is not so simple.

I keep my Facebook profile visible and make private what I want. Doing that for a popular person (obviously not my case) is a good idea to avoid getting asked to be friends. If all can see your page, even if it is not all public, people will not need to ask permission to see your page by requesting to be a friend. They will visit discreetly and be satisfied that way.

I certainly appreciate viewing your Facebook page on a regular basis but Flickr is where I visit daily. That is where the interesting information is located and where I enjoy my visits, even when discreet.

Reply
TMLizzy Irwin

Jun 5, 2009 at 3:48 pm

Funny! I ended up ‘hiding’ everyone’s updates. The only ones I see are the people I know and care about – so not many. 😀

Reply
caitlinburke

Jun 6, 2009 at 3:54 am

Hiding people one by one is time-consuming, though. If you want to be generous in what you show but selective in what you see, you can create a group for your close contacts, and just select their updates.

Reply
Tayne

Jun 6, 2009 at 8:33 am

After a lot of perdsauding from real friends I joined facebook.
And got more junk email in a month than I normally get in two years.
I then found out that there is no way to delete your facebook!
So I changed my age, location, gender and marital status and sent everything to a junk-collector email address that I ahven’t checked since.

Reply
complexify.

Jun 6, 2009 at 5:50 pm

Tayne: FYI there’s now an official way to delete your Facebook account, instead of just "deactivating": http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=delete_account

Reply
Tayne

Jun 6, 2009 at 7:19 pm

Thank you Complexify, the deed is done.
Although I’m still suspicious of the facebook people…

Reply
!MimosaMicheMichelle!

Jun 6, 2009 at 7:26 pm

Here is a link to a local site (Québec) that explains how to either hide your Facebook account or to definitely delete your Facebook account. The article is at the bottom of the page. It is in French. Some information is obvious from the graphics. If anyone wants to know the details, I can translate and summarize. I will not do it otherwise. (too busy)

How to delete, disactivate or destroy your Facebook profile.

Reply
edmo321

Jul 31, 2009 at 8:29 am

seriously? are you really too good for your fans?

Reply
jurvetson

Jul 31, 2009 at 5:25 pm

not at all. The issue is as discussed above – I wish there was an asymmetric accept whereby I can not fill my stream with hundreds of updates from people I don’t know. Manually labeling each of them after the fact seems like a bit too much effort on an ongoing basis. So my backlog grows as I wait to see if fB tweaks this process….

Reply
jurvetson

Jan 17, 2011 at 6:53 am

heh… revisiting this…. Wowd can help, but meanwhile, the queue has doubled again…

Reply
caitlinburke

Jan 17, 2011 at 2:25 pm

How funny that rejecting/ignoring Facebook requests might equal "too good for your fans." Facebook still has limits on how many friends an individual can be linked to, doesn’t it? Facebook directs people to create pages, rather than a personal entry, for entities that accumulate fans and thus need ("need") what amounts to a broadcast page with commenting features within the site.

Reply
!MimosaMicheMichelle!

Jan 27, 2011 at 6:57 am

Since I last wrote here 20 months ago, I started another Facebook account. It has already been 17 months of pleasure. You see, the Facebook you know me in is the social account whereas the newer one is my "mag" / magazine.

In the social account, I post something only occasionally. There, I have few friends (and even fewer real friends) and I hide most people, those who keep posting nonsense just so they are "heard" each day. I see your posts and a few others but I see no pages. By the way, I ignore invitations to games and pokes etc.

However, in my "mag" (a French expression, short for magazine), I rarely post anything and I have practically no friends except myself but this is where I add hundreds of pages. My personalized magazine is just that, a place where I see interesting posts made by representatives of websites. I choose what I see in my custom-made magazine. I also choose to read what I want when I want and only if I want to so I often skip a lot. However, I get to browse through such a wide variety of subjects that I know might interest me and I sometimes read interesting things. I occasionally make comments under certain posts. I also get news and weather immediately. I am up-to-date with all the latest news and information, often things I would have missed otherwise. Most importantly, I am so happy with this Facebook account compared to the social one! I devised a system that suits me perfectly. This account is very useful and relevant in my life.

I have a third account just for very private use. It is for a couple of friends. I also send myself articles there just for my eyes and use.

Keeping the social exchanges separate from the website pages is key for me. I remain signed in to each Facebook account in a different browser which also remains open at all times to give me instant access to all. I am neither chained to one or the other of my Facebook accounts. I am not a slave to them. They work for me. It is the same for Flickr. I share this for you Steve, or anyone else, in case it inspires you to do the same.

http://www.facebook.com/#!/profile.php?id=100000159916242

Reply
jurvetson

Jan 29, 2011 at 4:06 am

Good solution that…. I think the multimodal approach speaks to a failure in the system, but I may be wrong. Perhaps it reflects our identities and allows us to partition them better than before.

Reply
!MimosaMicheMichelle!

Jan 29, 2011 at 6:04 am

I must admit that on the Internet, I always keep parts of my life and interests separate. I have always had multiple email addresses and multiple everything else. There is a theme for each email account. Important mail such as private mail, business/finance-related mail and other mail I want to keep go to separate addresses but are stored on my computer. All newsletters go to web-based accounts so as to not ever take up room on my computer. One example, all food-related newsletters go together in a special account which I visit only when I feel in the mood for that subject. Other newsletters about various subjects have their place. That way, I feel less overwhelmed.

My Facebook solution is more generalized but there are already systems there such as lists to separate subjects anyway. However, I cannot mix pages from websites together with social interactions with people all in the same place, hence the two accounts mentioned above. Maybe you will try that one day. It is far less overwhelming, I assure you. You would never see what you show in your screen-shot here. There are no invites or friends to add in the "mag". It is a bit like your morning newspaper. It is a place to browse the information freely and at your own pace. Freedom!

Reply
caitlinburke

Jan 29, 2011 at 11:03 pm

I would agree that there are failures in the Facebook system, but I think they are vastly larger than can be approached with simply separating streams of information within Facebook. Facebook itself has plans and business interests, but they require individual accounts to make the inputs, on which Facebook then does operations. The Facebook user is not a customer; It’s part of the product.

(I do have a presence on Facebook to show connections and establish a base for people in my life who have no other involvement in social media, but as a connector it strikes me as the lowest common denominator rather than something engaging.)

Reply
jurvetson

May 24, 2011 at 5:59 pm

and now a blog post from a new company addressing just this, Altly…

"Summary

Facebook is dramatically changing the way we communicate with our friends, family, business associates, and the other groups of people in our lives.

We are pressured to become “friends” with people that we would not have had ongoing communication with prior to Facebook.

We are also pressured to share more and more personal information with not only “friends” but “friends of friends”.

Facebook’s privacy settings are so complex that even advanced users have a hard time configuring them, understanding who can see what, and Facebook continues to change its privacy settings without first alerting users, creating serious problems with serious consequences.

Facebook subjugates our personal information and our digital identities, and then sells us, as products, to advertisers, without regard for our rights, and with no value to us.

Facebook doesn’t just want to own our communications while on Facebook, but is spreading its tentacles across the entire Web with their Facebook Connect login, Facebook Like buttons, and Facebook Comments, making it practically impossible to have private use of the Internet.

At this time there are no real alternatives to Facebook, as most people believe that no one can possibly create an alternative.

Altly.com is building an alternative to Facebook, with a dramatically different view of our rights to privacy and ownership of our personal information."

Reply
McPHX

May 24, 2011 at 11:05 pm

Just reserved my name, thanks! My real name :O)

Reply

Facebook Friends ?

31 responses to “Facebook Friends ?”

Leave a Reply to caitlinburke Cancel reply