Comments on: Your Facebook Friends Aren’t Real

By: Tim Courtney

Tim Courtney — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 02:23:04 +0000

I don’t have a consistent friending policy. When I get a request from someone I don’t know, I look at mutual contacts and their profile to get an idea if I want to connect, and make a decision on an individual basis.

Where it gets dicier is unfriending and selectively friending people you know. I’ve unfriended a couple loose acquaintances who pollute my newsfeed with melodramatic status updates (only to have them stalk me with requests). I’ve also *not* unfriended a person because I don’t want to deal with the fallout (thank you limited profile groups!).

By: Ash

Ash — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 03:32:07 +0000

It’s a bit late now, but I think the more appropriate term is not “friend”, it’s “contact”. Adding someone to my friends list, to me, means little more than adding their email address to my contacts list. My genuine friends are all contacts, where possible, but not all of my contacts are genuine friends.

By: Mitchell Tsai

Mitchell Tsai — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 21:23:59 +0000

I’ve only been playing with Facebook for 8 months, but I’m adding five types of friends.

a) 50% current friends & acquaintances
b) 5% current work/networking contacts
c) 30% old friends & acquaintances 1981-2002 that I lost touch with (college, grad school, work)
d) 10% my invites: people I’ve never met in person, but I found their internet presence interesting…or want to contact them in real-life later.
e) 10% people who found me on Facebook.

On LinkedIn, I have 8 contacts of another type
f) 7% ultra-networked people (20,000-40,000 friends)

Due to the way LinkedIn shows information, it helps to have at least a 3rd degree connection when trying to view someone (or to pay $240/yr). Connecting to a few ultra-networked people allows me access to 5+ million out of the 23 million people.

In practice, I almost never (

By: Chris

Chris — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 14:21:08 +0000

apropos “counting friends”, what I really don’t like is that now (for ~ a month or so) the first thing on my facebook profile is “View Chris’s friends (xxx)”, that cannot turned off as far as I know, and even if you send email invitations, they say sth like “Hi I’m Chris, I have yyy Wall posts and xxx friends….” ?!?
That number is, as Sebastian said, pointless, and the more ‘friends’ you almost don’t know are in my list, the less interesting the News Feed gets..

By: Jacob

Jacob — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 05:08:37 +0000

NSW = New South Wales = Sydney and Environs. Have a nice day!

PS: Oh, and of my far too many (700+ish) friends on facebook, I probably know all but four of them on a first name basis (and can remember their names when I see them).

By: Sebastian Lewis

Sebastian Lewis — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 08:10:45 +0000

What’s the point in adding a hundred or so people you don’t know just for the hell of it? I never have and likely never will understand that, maybe I shouldn’t criticize people who do that, but on the other hand it’s rather pointless, wouldn’t you say? The only thing that happens in the end is you make yourself look popular, except anyone taking a critical eye to that kind of case would not believe it and would see right through this anyway.

Sebastian