Friday, January 08, 2010

Unfriended!



I like Facebook, kinda sortof. It fits in well with my life as a voyeur, and I get to participate. My friends are my friends (those on FB), I have some random people there--like a carpool mom I don't really know, and I have a lot of elementary/high school folks, some of whom I've found, and some of who have found me.

So some of these people who want to be my friends are high school folks I don't remember. Okay, maybe the name is familiar, or maybe it's not. They have all the same High School friends in common and they live where I grew up, and hey, who wants to hurt anyone's feelings, so I've confirmed pretty much anyone who asks. Why not? I'll tell you why not, because some of these people play all these games on Facebook (Farmville and Bejeweled are particularly popular among my peers) and who cares if they got a new animal? But every time I sign on to FB, my news feed is filled with their scores. Fat Doctor---Oh, she's the best, but I took her feed off my FB page, though we still remain friends.

I decided to Unfriend the people I don't know, don't remember, and who fill up my news feed. FB doesn't tell you if you're "un" friended, right? Only I unfriended some stranger and two days later I got friend request from her, again! No No No No! Go away! Go play Farmville!

You know, I am too old for this stuff.

11 comments:

talesofacrazypsychmajor said...

I friended a middle school aged family friend on facebook recently. Never again will I friend a tween.

She's nice in person, but a monster on facebook. Tons of posts begging for me to send her farmville gifts and spamming my friends feed.

The people who re-friend shortly after removing them are creepy. How'd they even notice I removed them so quickly? I did a big clean out of people from high school who I never really was particularly good friends with and shortly after I was re-sent friend requests.

Anonymous said...

Did you know you can hide those game posts without hiding the person's other posts? That is what I do. If you put your cursor beside a Farmville post the word hide will appear. You can then click hide Sue Smith or hide Farmville posts, for instance. If you say hide Farmville, then Sue Smith's posts will still show up but nobody's Farmville posts will show up on your feed. I do that for every game and now I only see the individual person's posts. I had one friend who played about a dozen different games, but now I see none of that, and I have unfriended nobody. Just thought I would let you know in case you didn't already know this.

Karen

moviedoc said...

You are not too old, but don't you worry that a patient will try to friend you? I like that I can hide behind moviedoc and behavenet. And none of my patients gets my email address.

Rach said...

I unfriended nearly 55% of my facebook friends. in other news, I've also found 2 extra hours a day to sleep.

April said...

They can't see that you've unfriended them, but when they try to look at your page they'll figure it out (depending on your privacy settings).

I had an older cousin-by-marriage I had to unfriend for stalker-ish behavior. She kept sending me requests and messages, so I finally emailed her and said, "Don't make me get a restraining order." Not really, but just made it clear we're not "friends." And I lost ZERO sleep over it.

Dragonfly said...

I block all application invitations. Sounds harsh but there are heaps of things that are more fun to waste time with in my opinion - there appears to be a Cafe application that seems as popular as Farmville now as well.
And the people who do 10 quizzes a day to find out more about themselves? Sigh.
I haven't unfriended many people but I have hid the feeds of those sharing far too much detail about their love lives.

Battle Weary said...

You can set you home page to only show status messages and wall postings...that's what I have done!

Anonymous said...

I had to unfriend my aunt when she kept e-mailing me asking about the song lyrics on my statuses.

Anonymous said...

Your Facebook adventures are amazing!

Anonymous said...

If you have facebook friends in common, you probably show up on their "people you might know" list again after you've unfriended them. I think some people send friend requests to everyone on that list. They might not even have noticed that you unfriended them, only that you showed up on their list of possible acquaintances. If they've got thousands of "friends," there are probably too many names on both their friends list and their "people you might know" list to be able to keep track of them at all.

Meg said...

Facebook has a wonderful new feature, and as soon as I saw it, I thought of you. When you ignore a friend request (For example the weirdo who hits on you when you send them a message asking if you know them, in response to their friend request. Do you get those too? Wouldn't they at least target single people?) there's an option to specify that you don't know the person!