My policy on Facebook’s “Add me as friend” requests

I thought about this for a long time. What should I do about new friends requests?

With Twitter, things are simple – I only follow four other Twitter accounts – Twitter / People Olivian_BREDA is following.

On Google Plus I follow two accounts – Olivian BREDA – Google+.

On LinkedIn, adding one as a business connection is fine – “who knows, maybe something will come out of this”. It generally leads to (relatively spammy) commercial messages or phone calls, but it’s something which is relatively fine with me. I don’t care about the number of connections in there.

On Facebook, friendship is mutual. “I friend you, you friend me.” The only problem is, one can’t have more than 5,000 friends. That’s the sole purpose of this message – Facebook has a limit, what to do now with the requests?

So, how to answer to requests?

• Surely, say “Yes” to close friends, some (if any) relatives, and people you care. OK, all the relatives, they’re family.
• How about people you know in person, but don’t keep a good contact with? I’d say it’s fine to have them as contacts. A lot of people don’t use public profiles, with public information and public everything, so, if after 5 years you want to know “Hmm, I wonder what do my high school colleagues do?” you can find out easily. So, “Yes” to this point also. I personally don’t have a problem with reaching 5,000 people with this criteria (people I’ve known for a while, work colleagues, class mates, friends from childhood).
• Now the tricky part – how to answer to total strangers, “never seen them in my life”, “don’t have a clue who they are”. Even people who you only barely know or have a slight interest in are in this part (“but I consider you my friend on Facebook!”). I’ll detail below.

First, the 5,000 limit is easily attainable if you say “yes” to everyone. After a while, people add you because you’re in their network of friends (“a friend of 3 of my friends is a friend of mine”). I manage other Facebook accounts, and after 500 persons, even if you’re not active at all on Facebook, people start adding you based on Facebook’s suggestion to add people as friend. If you have an email account on Facebook which is known on the Internet, if you are active on other Facebook pages and groups, then the requests generally grow even faster.

Criteria:

• Option 1: “I’ll ask you who you are”. I used to do this. I would ask anyone I didn’t know and added me as friend “How do we know each other?”. Consequences of this:
• Some people were annoyed by this. “Why do you bug me with the question?” I’m not sure I want to add such persons as friends, but still, some people seemed to take the question rather personally.
• It took some time. After a while, it bugs me too.
• Final argument – even if a person doesn’t know me, or I don’t know her, this doesn’t imply we can’t be friends. Generally, online friendships (to me) aren’t quite well working, but I do like a person on the Internet, a person which I’ve never known besides an avatar (I don’t know – name, age, how that person looks like, current work status, for whom does that person work. Never seen that person one time. I haven’t read something new about that person for years. It’s only an avatar, and I like that avatar a lot.). So, a brand new thing, based solely on Internet, never seen on another ever, while generally not very fine with me, may develop well.
• Option 2: “I’ll add you since you’ve added me. If you consider me a friend, I consider you a friend”. Err, the problems:
• The 5,000 limit.
• If you visit an Internet web site with a Facebook widget , they tend to show you friends who liked that web site, or recent activity on that web site from your friends. It becomes strange to see people you know nothing about on that widget – “Hey, Mr. X liked this”. “Who cares about that?”

So, what to do?

• My current decision is:
• Don’t generally accept (except in rare circumstances) institutions adding you as friends (“Oh, we’re the Green Carrots and we like to add you as friends”. “Oh, no!”). Sometimes, funny circumstances occur when Facebook updates the status – “Olivian is now friend with Romanian Language”. “Olivian and Shopping Mania are now friends”. “Olivian is now friend with Finding Himself”.
• Don’t say yes to people who just seemed to have discovered Facebook and add you based on Facebook suggestions (it’s not that hard to tell – new to Facebook, nothing on their wall, just added 30 friends, you know nothing of the person, sometimes you live, geographical, in different areas).
• Say yes to pretty much everyone else.
• Disadvantages of my decision:
• When I’ll get to 4,500 friends I’ll have to do an annoying clean-up of the people I have in my list and know nothing about. “Oh, you’re not my friend? After all those years since I’ve read you, never commented on anything, never liked/shared anything, never posting on your wall. I hate you for not being my friend anymore”. OK, I’ll have to live with this.
• I’ll occasionally get things from people I know nothing about – invites to events, private messages, invitations to play games. On a side note, forcing me to add my own birthday on someone else’s birthday application, because:
• That person doesn’t know how to use external applications – How to import the birthday addresses of Facebook into Google Calendar? – Get a result now!.
• Is plain lazy and won’t add my birthday manually.
  is a bit strange to me. “Please help me send you a birthday wish on your birthday.” “Riiiiiight.”

• When I’ll visit any web site on the Internet, I’ll most likely see a Facebook friend who liked that web site, whether I know that person in person or not.

On Facebook I follow about 30 people / pages / accounts, in total. I thought, sometimes, to reduce the 1,000+ friends list to 30. But there’s no reason for it. For now.

Now, preparing for the 4,500 moment.