Jonah has one:
Is it bad form to “un-friend” folks I don’t know personally and send them to the fan page? It seems awfully rude. But I have actual longtime 3-Dimensional friends who can’t “friend” me because I hit the limit.
I don’t have that problem, not just because I’m not as popular and well-known (and debonair) as Jonah, but because I take Facebook friending almost (but not quite) as seriously as meatspace friending. I don’t Facebook friend people that I don’t know and have not interacted with (at least on line, if not in flesh and blood)– to do so would seem to make the term “friend” meaningless. The only exceptions are if we have a high number of mutual friends, or if someone takes the trouble to write a note with the friend request explaining who they are and why they want to be friends, which doesn’t happen very much (about three times, in my experience).
That said, it wouldn’t have to be rude if you explained why. I would think that most would understand. It might be nice to have a script that would be autogenerated when you did it to provide the explanation. It would be a pain to have to cut and paste it for each unfriending. And never having unfriended someone, I’m not even sure that such an explanation is an option, short of actually sending them a Facebook message, which would be a royal PITA. I don’t think you’re automatically alerted if you’re unfriended (it’s happened to me once, and I didn’t receive any notice of it — I just noticed one day that they were no longer my Facebook friend, or rather, I wasn’t theirs). So I guess if you unfriend a lot of people, some of them will notice, and some of those will ask for an explanation. I guess something else to do would be to put up a notice on your wall warning the general Facebook friendom that some of them were about to become unfriended, with an explanation why and a request not to take it personally.
I have been de-friended by a couple of my more liberal acquaintances on Facebook because of my strong conservative views, but most of them will re-friend me after I tell them I like the debate we have on issues.
I particularly enjoy dismantling their assumptions that conservative = Republican, for me at least.
I’ve unfriended people who actually were friends, but who flamed me every time I made an observation that was even remotely political. They never did it in person, and it seems rude and cowardly to do it on my wall.
It’s a good idea, from the standpoint of security, to only friend people you actually know. On the other hand, I’ve made some new acquaintances whose correspondence I enjoy. It’s possible to overthink this, IMHO….
There is a limit?
Yes, apparently five thousand.
That reminds me, it’s been four or five months since I checked out Facebook…
facebook? myspace? What are these arcane, likely ungrammatical formulations of which you speak? The wife-unit also complains about my turning on my cell for short periods and relatively randomly. My reply: It’s a tool, not a harness.
Many people collect “friends” as they play the games.
A friend of mine … whom I actually personally know … deletes those who aren’t helping her win games … she is at the 5,000 limit! lol
Maybe FB should create a new category for enemies?
🙂
Either that or somebody could create a new social networking site called Assbook, for just that sort of thing.