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Who Unfriended You, and Why
Barence writes "Given that social-networking sites like to put across a happy-clappy image of friendship and joy, it's not surprising that they're less keen to tell you when someone doesn't want to be as friendly with you any more. PC Pro reveals how to find out who really hates you on social networks. It's possible to track who's quietly dropped you from their Facebook friends list, for example, by installing Firefox's Greasemonkey add-in and running a special script. Meanwhile, there are sites that will reveal the exact tweet that turned people off your Twitter account."
I'm pretty sure I don't really give a crap who drops me. I go through my list and clean house about once every couple months. As a racing cyclist I get friend invites all the time from people I barely know. I keep them around for a while and if they don't participate or I find I really don't like them in person I add them to the drop list for next housecleaning time. People worry about what other people think about them WAY too much. I just don't give a fuck.
.. doesn't 'friend' you on Facebook in the first place.
There is a habit lots of people on Facebook have where they have a Gotta' Catch em All - Pokemon sorta mentality where they HAVE to have the largest number of friends possible. When I visit my facebook page I just add everyone who asks just because I dont care. I have close to 900 'friends' and the majority of them are people I will never associate with or have no association with they just added me through another friend. I dont really care who deletes me or adds me.. and I think its a sad commentary on somone who goes out of their way to search people who have removed them from their lists. Facebook is just getting ridiculous anyway I cant wait for it to burn out just like My Space.
When you dislike the human race as much as I do, Karma:Bad is inevitable lol.
...but apparently there's something about Facebook I can care even less about.
I wonder if my wife has used this. 'Cuz I never really told her why.
I don't like you any more. In fact, for the last 30 years, I found you kind of intolerable.
Signed,
The Egyptian People
I don't even understand the need to unfriend, I just remove them from my news feed. That way they can see my stuff, driving traffic to my blog. I use to delete people but now I don't.
Jonathanjk.com
If I can't tell I was unfriended on my own odds are I don't care enough about that person anyway.
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
I'm missing the connection you suggest between using social networking sites and caring what other people think. I fought Facebook for years because it's just another flash in the pan fad, but while my son was at army basic training he mentioned that his unit had a Facebook page. So I signed up just to be able to read whatever news they posted.
Turns out friends I lost track of years ago are also there, and friends I'd like to keep up with but don't seem to use email much. So after my son came home I kept up with Facebook. Not because I give a flying Microsoft what people think, but because it's nice to know how my friends are doing -- I would not have otherwise known that a former colleague has been diagnosed with breast cancer, or the daughter of a family friend is having a baby. I block all the announcements of who is playing what games, I roll my eyes whenever one of them succumbs to the "If you care about SOME_CAUSE you will post this as your status" meme, and once in a while I can follow up with some concern -- "How did that operation turn out?" "Did you pass neurobiology?" "Did you get any cool pictures of that horrible growth before they removed it?"
Another thing Facebook revealed was that I'm far more social than I realized. I vowed from the start that I would never accept random friend requests; I only added as friends people I personally know, either in a current environment or a close relationship to in the past. That obnoxious kid whom I only remember because we sat in the same math class? Nope. My best friend's daughter whom I have never met? Nope. The girl who got stuck with me in a special reading group in the first grade because we were both ahead of the rest of the class? Boy, was I glad to find her! So anyway, even with my strict limits on who gets added as a friend, I have about 200. Every single one of them I can tell you about their family or work, I can picture their faces in my memory, I can remember why they are important to me.
As a typical antisocial nerd, I'm astounded. I honestly thought I couldn't count more than five friends across 47.78 years of life.
So yeah, Facebook has the potential to be a mind-numbing exercise in idiocy... but if you use it carefully, it's a great means of keeping up with friends when there isn't really a practical way to call up all 200 of them and ask how they're doing.
hypocrisy n. pl -sies
1. the practice of professing standards, beliefs, etc, contrary to one's real character or actual behaviour, esp he pretence of virtue and piety (-source: World English Dictionary)
Alice bitches about the evil of Product X but makes such choices in her life so as to use more Product X than all of her friends and neighbors.
Bob points out that Person A does both, but he doesn't pretend to care one way or the other about Product X.
Alice is a hypocrite. Bob is not. Bob might be irresponsibly using Product X himself, or he might be a pompous asshole who likes to point out others' mistakes, but unless Bob at the same time explicitly points out or at least strongly implies that he does not share those self-same faults, Bob is not practicing hypocrisy.
MSIE: The world's most standards-complaint web browser.
The issue of who wants to friend you and why is not addressed by this application. What this application does is to provide information that is publicly available. That information consists of two elements: changes to your friends list and whether a friend request is still outstanding. Both of these pieces of information are available to the observant face book user. The app just makes it easier to notice.
Correlating these pieces of information to an explanation of why they happened isn't something the app actually does. One can conjecture that a post of "politican X is worse than Hitler" followed by friend Y defriending you means that Y likes politician X. But that is conjecture. The timing could have been coincidental.
Moreover, it could be that someone does want to friend you but thinks that for whatever reason it might not be expedient. After all, a relationship on Facebook is really only a name on an access control list. It doesn't really indicate whether one has a friendly relationship in real life. As an example, a professor may be good friends with undergraduate students but may feel that being "friends" on Facebook is inappropriate until such time as those students graduate.
So I don't see an "evil" here. Rather, I just see one more tool that can be used correctly or incorrectly, appropriately or inappropriately, for good or for evil.
Point out to her that if she just leaves it pending, the supervisor can't send it again.