I have a kind of embarrassing one, but that’s kind of the point of this discussion so here goes.
For some reason I’ve always had an aversion to social networking websites. I remember when all my peers used xanga, then livejournal, then myspace, and now facebook, and I always refused to use them whatsoever. I realize now though, that they represent a massive utility that I desperately need.
I am worried though, about starting new. Maybe I’m being overly paranoid, but it seems that having few friends on such a website signals low status, as does getting into the game this late.
So should I just create an account and add every single person I am even tangentially acquainted with? Is there a feature on facebook where you can hide who your friends are? Is it appropriate to ask someone you just met to friend you? What other cultural and social knowledge am I missing in this area?
I think people have very different standards as far as social networking goes. I would recommend deciding from the offset what you want to use Facebook for, and establish friending policies on that basis. If it’s for keeping in touch with your nearest and dearest, keep it to a select few. If you want a conduit for talking to everyone you’ve ever met, add everyone you meet.
If I see someone who only has a handful of FB friends, I assume they’re towards the more private end of the spectrum rather than thinking they’re somehow socially retarded. Likewise if someone has 800+ FB friends, I don’t think they regularly hang out with them all.
There is such a thing as a late adopter advantage. I don’t think most people make these kinds of decisions when they first enter into that kind of environment, so you actually have the benefit of deciding off the bat how you want to use it, and how to optimise your usage for that aim.
For people I actually care about, I have better means of staying in touch. My inner circle has had a private voice chat server for years now, and that’s part of the reason I haven’t really been forced to use a social networking website.
But I’m trying to dramatically change who I am as a person, and this is a necessary step. I have severe issues with self-consciousness and social anxiety (despite acknowledging that this is unjustified as I am affable and attractive) so I am generally looking for ways to ease myself into social normalcy.
You need to be more specific though; or at least you have the advantage of being able to choose specifically what you want to use it for. For example, I pretty much only use Facebook for sharing pictures and videos of my kid. I may go weeks without paying attention to it. I have a wide mix of people including both people at work, family and old friends from highschool who I would normally share this type of thing with when they ask. So now when someone asks about my kid I’ll just ask if I can friend them.
Quentin, I worried too about the “few friends = low status” thing when I started on Facebook. But speaking now as an old hand I’m fairly confident that the only people who make such judgments or worry about them are newbies!
And yes, you CAN hide who your friends are.on Facebook. There are many other privacy settings as well. It would be too complicated to go into it here but they have a Help Center which will tell you how. You can find the Help link on the menu that will open up when you click on “Account” (at the top right-hand of any page) or, in small letters, at the very bottom of any page on the far right.
It’s OK to ask someone you just met to friend you.
Not only do some people friend every last acquaintance, it’s also common to friend people for the purpose of game play (there are numerous game applications you can access through Facebook, and for one reason or another it’s often advantageous to play with people who are friends, so people will friend one another for the sake of the game). Then there are people who friend friends of friends because of shared interests or whatever. Bottom line: If somebody has 1,000 friends, nobody assumes that he is best buds with all those folks in real life.
Don’t worry too much about the etiquette—if you spend some time with it you’ll pick it up. Most people will be happy to help you out if they can (though a lot of people don’t know about all the privacy settings. They’re really not hard to set but you have to look for the info.)
A very good friend of mine created her Facebook account just a few weeks ago, and I still think she’s cool. So getting into the game late is at least sometimes recoverable from.
Adding everyone you are even tangentially acquainted with seems to be the social convention, including people you’ve just met; it’s common for me to receive facebook invites after meeting someone at a party, for example.
FB has some tools for bulk-link-farming… e.g., it will look at your email if you let it and contact everyone whose name appears in it who has a FB account. I did this when I created my FB account (a couple of years ago) and it worked pretty well.
As far as I know, there’s no way to hide your friends.
The teenagers of my acquaintance frequently use fake names on Facebook to subvert searches. The adults frequently create multiple Facebook profiles, more or less for the same reason.
I quit social networking sites because they made my life significantly worse. If you really need to use them, you can, but don’t worry. There is a wide variety of ways to use them, ranging from adding hundreds of people to just a few friends.
So should I just create an account and add every single person I am even tangentially acquainted with?
Yes, you can do this, but you don’t have to. This is one reasonable way of using the site that a lot of people use, but it’s also common to restrict things to people you know better.
Is there a feature on facebook where you can hide who your friends are?
YES. Absolutely. And it’s an essential feature. If you do use Facebook please pay close attention to the privacy settings. You can make everything about yourself private, to the point where no one else, even your friends, can see anything except messages you specifically send them.
Is it appropriate to ask someone you just met to friend you?
Yes, it’s pretty common to do this, though you may be surprised by how many people don’t like to use these sites.
When you make an account there is a high chance you will get flooded by friend requests right away. Facebook does some shady things with user data for their convenience. Also there are still enough non-Facebookees that you will not be the last to get online.
You can also send friendship requests to people who don’t have a FB account yet, if you have their email address. I received the first such request about one year before signing up, and when I eventually did sign up I had about ten such requests.
These days having few friends frequently signals maturity or coolness—someone who doesn’t add everyone they’ve ever met to look like they have lots of friends.
I think the sweet spot is between 10 and 200 - go over that and people tend to imagine ‘there’s no way he could actually have that many friends, he just adds people at random and cares too much about popularity’.
Edit: Having said that, I just went back to my fb, which I no longer really use, and I’m on over 350. But largely that’s because I’ve had it for a long time and not removed people I no longer see or have any real intention of seeing, so I don’t only have actual friends as friends either.
I have a kind of embarrassing one, but that’s kind of the point of this discussion so here goes.
For some reason I’ve always had an aversion to social networking websites. I remember when all my peers used xanga, then livejournal, then myspace, and now facebook, and I always refused to use them whatsoever. I realize now though, that they represent a massive utility that I desperately need.
I am worried though, about starting new. Maybe I’m being overly paranoid, but it seems that having few friends on such a website signals low status, as does getting into the game this late.
So should I just create an account and add every single person I am even tangentially acquainted with? Is there a feature on facebook where you can hide who your friends are? Is it appropriate to ask someone you just met to friend you? What other cultural and social knowledge am I missing in this area?
I think people have very different standards as far as social networking goes. I would recommend deciding from the offset what you want to use Facebook for, and establish friending policies on that basis. If it’s for keeping in touch with your nearest and dearest, keep it to a select few. If you want a conduit for talking to everyone you’ve ever met, add everyone you meet.
If I see someone who only has a handful of FB friends, I assume they’re towards the more private end of the spectrum rather than thinking they’re somehow socially retarded. Likewise if someone has 800+ FB friends, I don’t think they regularly hang out with them all.
There is such a thing as a late adopter advantage. I don’t think most people make these kinds of decisions when they first enter into that kind of environment, so you actually have the benefit of deciding off the bat how you want to use it, and how to optimise your usage for that aim.
For people I actually care about, I have better means of staying in touch. My inner circle has had a private voice chat server for years now, and that’s part of the reason I haven’t really been forced to use a social networking website.
But I’m trying to dramatically change who I am as a person, and this is a necessary step. I have severe issues with self-consciousness and social anxiety (despite acknowledging that this is unjustified as I am affable and attractive) so I am generally looking for ways to ease myself into social normalcy.
You need to be more specific though; or at least you have the advantage of being able to choose specifically what you want to use it for. For example, I pretty much only use Facebook for sharing pictures and videos of my kid. I may go weeks without paying attention to it. I have a wide mix of people including both people at work, family and old friends from highschool who I would normally share this type of thing with when they ask. So now when someone asks about my kid I’ll just ask if I can friend them.
Quentin, I worried too about the “few friends = low status” thing when I started on Facebook. But speaking now as an old hand I’m fairly confident that the only people who make such judgments or worry about them are newbies!
And yes, you CAN hide who your friends are.on Facebook. There are many other privacy settings as well. It would be too complicated to go into it here but they have a Help Center which will tell you how. You can find the Help link on the menu that will open up when you click on “Account” (at the top right-hand of any page) or, in small letters, at the very bottom of any page on the far right.
It’s OK to ask someone you just met to friend you.
Not only do some people friend every last acquaintance, it’s also common to friend people for the purpose of game play (there are numerous game applications you can access through Facebook, and for one reason or another it’s often advantageous to play with people who are friends, so people will friend one another for the sake of the game). Then there are people who friend friends of friends because of shared interests or whatever. Bottom line: If somebody has 1,000 friends, nobody assumes that he is best buds with all those folks in real life.
Don’t worry too much about the etiquette—if you spend some time with it you’ll pick it up. Most people will be happy to help you out if they can (though a lot of people don’t know about all the privacy settings. They’re really not hard to set but you have to look for the info.)
A very good friend of mine created her Facebook account just a few weeks ago, and I still think she’s cool. So getting into the game late is at least sometimes recoverable from.
Adding everyone you are even tangentially acquainted with seems to be the social convention, including people you’ve just met; it’s common for me to receive facebook invites after meeting someone at a party, for example.
FB has some tools for bulk-link-farming… e.g., it will look at your email if you let it and contact everyone whose name appears in it who has a FB account. I did this when I created my FB account (a couple of years ago) and it worked pretty well.
As far as I know, there’s no way to hide your friends.
The teenagers of my acquaintance frequently use fake names on Facebook to subvert searches. The adults frequently create multiple Facebook profiles, more or less for the same reason.
I quit social networking sites because they made my life significantly worse. If you really need to use them, you can, but don’t worry. There is a wide variety of ways to use them, ranging from adding hundreds of people to just a few friends.
Yes, you can do this, but you don’t have to. This is one reasonable way of using the site that a lot of people use, but it’s also common to restrict things to people you know better.
YES. Absolutely. And it’s an essential feature. If you do use Facebook please pay close attention to the privacy settings. You can make everything about yourself private, to the point where no one else, even your friends, can see anything except messages you specifically send them.
Yes, it’s pretty common to do this, though you may be surprised by how many people don’t like to use these sites.
When you make an account there is a high chance you will get flooded by friend requests right away. Facebook does some shady things with user data for their convenience. Also there are still enough non-Facebookees that you will not be the last to get online.
You can also send friendship requests to people who don’t have a FB account yet, if you have their email address. I received the first such request about one year before signing up, and when I eventually did sign up I had about ten such requests.
These days having few friends frequently signals maturity or coolness—someone who doesn’t add everyone they’ve ever met to look like they have lots of friends.
I think the sweet spot is between 10 and 200 - go over that and people tend to imagine ‘there’s no way he could actually have that many friends, he just adds people at random and cares too much about popularity’.
Edit: Having said that, I just went back to my fb, which I no longer really use, and I’m on over 350. But largely that’s because I’ve had it for a long time and not removed people I no longer see or have any real intention of seeing, so I don’t only have actual friends as friends either.