Facebook follow-through
Although I’ve used the site for years, Facebook continues to amaze me. We all take mental memory lane trips every so often and remember the one friend from 10th grade that convinced us to skip class and hang out at IHOP. Not too long ago, the best the Internet had to offer a wannabe private eye was Google. While googling the names of friends and family (and even yourself, oh John Mayer!) is irresistibly addictive, it doesn’t always work – especially if your friends’ last name is Smith, Jones, etc and pulls up 1000s of hits.
Enter Facebook (and MySpace, Classmates.com, LinkedIn, and xyz)! Finally you can find every long-lost buddy you’ve ever had and friend them, poke them, harass them to your hearts desire… IF they have a profile. I’ve found friends from as far back as elementary school and have had many an old connection friend me out of the blue.
So what’s the proper conversation etiquette once you do reconnect with an old friend on Facebook? My hunch is that many of us search for those names in our past and friend them only to gain access to their profile and snoop around. And then comes the inevitable comparison of who’s doing better – you or them – with careers, love life, pursuit of happiness and all that jazz. Guilty as charged.
But, more often than not (hopefully!), we are genuinely interested in reconnecting with that person and want to begin a conversation. You take the first step and put yourself out there with a quick catch-you-up-on-the-last-several-years-of-my-life email and click send. And then you anxiously await a response while the insecure “I wonder if they even remember me?” feelings start creeping up just like you were back in high school. It’s all part of the Facebook follow-through dilemma. If they do reply – than great – one more friend! But the absence of a response makes you wonder…
The worst is when one of your Facebook friends reaches out to you, you respond, and then NOTHING. I’m one of those types that have always struggled to keep up with the many people I’ve met and left throughout the years. Moving from city to city and onto new chapters in your life, it’s so easy to let old friendships fall by the wayside. However, I’m trying to remedy this issue by taking a Facebook follow-through oath of sorts:
I swear, to the best of my ability, to follow-through on every friend request and email I receive on a social network and to not make friend requests purely out of curiosity.
I’ll let you know how this all pans out…
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Comments
Wow, I should re-read this before leaving comments…
“Facebook on the other hand remedied this problem by giving US applications while retaining the clean Facebook look.”
BTW – I haven’t deleted my accounts. I also made a vow last week; to retain them just in case I found that one long lost friend.
Gosh, I can hardly keep my Facebook account up to date. I don’t think I could handle all the work that goes into making a myspace page look like something that could make you go into shock.
I have a complete love-hate relationship with networking websites. I even threatened to delete all my accounts just last week. I never sign on. I never send messages. I never use them! Especially MySpace, seriously – what a joke. They are obviously the “PC People” of the networking while Facebook is “The Mac People”. Being a designer, I get severely turned off when I find a friend’s MySpace and it’s got “computer glitter”, which, sorry, doesn’t quite live up to the real thing, and so many other graphics that I can’t even make out where to leave a comment.
Facebook on the other hand remedied this problem by giving up applications while retaining the clean Facebook look.
I’m also on Google’s Orkut, the hub for Indian connections (I’m dating one). Have you heard of High 5? I used to be on there, One of my friends who was hispanic invited me there…seeing a trend? My next question starts here, and I hope it’s obvious…
…over and out.