Facebook Reiterates That You Can Reject Friends Without Looking Like A Jerk
August 26, 2009 ·Filed Under Technology News
Last night, I wrote about the largely unstated but well known rule-of-thumb for Twitter: That folks with more followers than the number of humans they are following, tend to be better folks to follow. Such a ratio cannot exist on Facebook considering unlike Twitter, it has a symmetric social graph — whether you friend someone, they have to accept your friend desire or else there is absolutely no connection (not including Fan pages). that puts additional pressure on you to accept all friend requests. It can be a burden.
And I think Facebook realizes that, which is why we’re getting a post today on its blog basically explaining that it’s okay not to accept all requests.
Specifically, the post notes that whether you go the button to disregard a friend demand, the person who requested you will not be notified about it. Likewise, whether you accept someone as a friend, but soon after later un-friend them, they will not be notified (though they will no longer be able to see your knowledge, nor will you be able to see their’s). And whether you don’t want to accept them, but don’t want them to be able to attempt to friend you again, Facebook recommends simply leaving their inquiry pending in your queue.
It’s interesting that Facebook felt the need to go by that again. That seems to speak to confusion by the symmetric nature of its social graph in a world of Twitter and other social services in which the “follower” is more common than the “friend.” Of course, there are benefits to that type of network, the key one being privacy.
But the problem is that as Facebook continues to grow and evolve, we’re getting more and more requests from random public that we don’t actually know. But many of us are using Facebook to spread information just as we do with Twitter (status updates, sharing hyperlinks, etc), and there is some desire to allow these random folks to be able to see some of what you are doing on Facebook. that is why Facebook created the “Everyone Button” and Fan Pages, but both of those seem to complicate the social graph, rather than simplify it.
The solution that I employ is to accept all Facebook friend requests but limit the public I do not actually know to a very basic profile using Facebook’s filters. I soon after hide many of these
It will be interesting to see how Facebook deals with that issue going forward. Remember that they just purchased FriendFeed, which features a combination of an asymmetric social graph with great filters. I can’t help but wonder whether Facebook won’t eventually switch to something like that.
Of course, we’re plus hearing that they’re very close to launching their location functionality (just like Twitter recently did), which will once again highlight the importance of privacy. nearly all location-based services are currently symmetric, considering while it’s one thing for random society to read your words or see what hyperlinks you’re sharing, it’s another for them to know where you are. considering of that, on services like Loopt and Foursquare I stick pretty firmly to only accepting users that I actually know.
As they approach 300 million users, Facebook continually has the firm situation of having to deal with these issues while figuring out how to educate all their current users whether they mean to build a change. Of course, having 300 million users is a problem a lot of social networks would like to have.
Update: Former TechCrunch writer Mark Hendrickson additionally shared some great thoughts about Facebook’s social graph on his personal blog recently. Here’s one specific interesting paragraph:
The main problem is that people’s real-world social graphs change often and automatically, while their virtual representations on Facebook change mostly uni-directionally and manually. In other words, friends come and go in real life; but on Facebook, they usually just come. Friend lists tend to get bloated by moment considering users have a harder duration defriending each other virtually than in real life. And even whether they are going to defriend each other virtually, it has to be a deliberative effort, unlike in real-life when you just stop seeing assured humans.
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