Tuesday, August 11, 2009

The Facebook Friend Conundrum!

The other day at a party I met two of my Facebook friends – one I haven’t met in a while; the other, I haven’t met in years. However, thanks to Facebook we were all fairly tuned into each other’s lives. I knew my musician friend was now an avid photographer, and the other friend had been busy because his mother was in hospital. Yes, status updates on Facebook can yield plenty of info!
That’s the wonderful thing about social networking sites – being able to keep in touch even if someone is miles away or we are too busy to meet even though we are in the same town. With photo uploads and status messages one gets to see friends holidaying or having fun and know whether they are pissed off with life or happy.
The flip side…you end up having a lot of ‘friends’ who you don’t actually know! Yes, there are many who are selective about who they accept but others accept at random. I, for instance, click to see the ‘mutual friend’ list and the decide whether to accept. So far, I’ve never got anyone of the creepy variety but…the painful variety…oh yes!
There is one, I presume jobless, ‘friend’ who is either answering a quiz every five minutes or uploading videos or playing a game or commenting on everyone’s status or giving a thumbs up to their photo albums…net result…my home page is flooded with info on how he won this, said that, lost that, is like Greta Garbo or there’s a list of his favourite movies, film stars, pizzas, dog breeds…whatever! Oh, yawn! Now I’m wondering…why oh why did I accept this rather garrulous online soul? Is he as talkative and informative in real life? Eeps!
Talking to my musician friend at the party, who also happens to be a ‘mutual friend’ of the above-mentioned voluble ‘pal’, we exchanged notes and discovered how out of depth we are! He too had accepted because the guy had many ‘mutual friends’. Now while my friend thought the online talker was into one profession, I thought he was into another…so much for knowing people online!
Moral of the story…be selective about your pals unless you want to be flooded with a stream of useless, and frankly, very boring, information!

2 comments:

  1. you could do a couple of things. one is to hover your mouse at the top right hand corner of the next post this friend makes. You'll find an option to hide all posts from him use it. A second more drastic step would be to knock him off your friend list. fb doesn’t tell tales and the guy probably will never find out :P enjoyed the posts. good to find you blogging. will be back for more.

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  2. Hey thanks Ujwala...that is a good tip and I've just knocked off one painful 'friend' from my list.
    Glad you enjoy the posts :)

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