A search for “artist” on LinkedIn gives me 244,028 people. Just sayin’
I’m glad it worked out, but I have to ask (since I’m always curious about these “what should I do?” threads)…
You posted this thread and then came back 30 minutes later with the answer. You pretty much made up your mind to email her no matter what, huh?
OTOH, if your relationship is that . . . thin? Don’t know what the word is, but, for example, all in one week my entire high school showed up on facebook (graduated in '90), and I wound up just hitting “sure why not?”, and later thinking “who the hell IS that, anyway?” or realizing that Sonia Patterson was not my friend Sonia Peterson (or whatever) or getting to a yearbook and going “Sheesh, I don’t remember you at all” or “oh, you’re THAT John. I used to hate you. . .” And, for the sake of not having a huge pile of random updates from people I don’t know well or don’t care about a lot or hardly remember, had a purge when I got over 150 friends, and chucked the ones I wasn’t FRIENDS with. Like, nothing personal, but, really, nothing personal. They won’t miss me either, but I hope they’re not neurotic about it if they do notice I’m gone.
It wasn’t clear in the original post, but this all happened over a short time period. We friended (I think I invited her b/c she showed up as a suggestion), maybe 2 weeks went by, I “liked” that one post, maybe 2 more weeks went by, I wanted to compliment her on something, thought Facebook would be a nice venue for a lighthearted “way to go,” and realized she was No Longer A (FB) Friend. This is about the “density” of most of my FB connections. She is a teacher, so maybe she decided to make extra steps in case she friends students to make sure her page stays G-rated. I don’t think I typically post anything more intense than PG-13 for advanced vocabulary, though.
shrug I work in the arts and not once has anyone ever asked me if I’m on LinkedIn. I do however get asked for my Facebook profile all the time, and it was ultimately the reason I finally decided to join FB.
Just sayin’. 
Y’all have a completely different experience with Facebook than I do. Nobody unfriends anyone if they are supposed to be friends in real life. And it’s extremely rare to unfriend anyone else. In fact, it’s often considered a slight if the person doesn’t friend you. You can called on it in public, even.
But, then again, you guys seem to notice a bunch of jerks posting crap. The worst I get is somebody telling me too many details about their day.
I mostly use facebook to keep close track of my friends’ success on various online games. Did the woman I went to elementary school with (but whom I don’t remember) plant a rose orchard in Farmville? Did my college friend’s wife get that untraceable cell phone she needed in Mafia Wars?
I don’t think I’d be particularly offended if someone defriended me. And it sounds like your colleague had a good reason.
I wish people would unfriend me. Between the religious nuts, the Obama is Hitler crowd, and the 5 minute updates on what people’s cats are doing, I never log on to stay in touch with the core group of people I actually give a crap about.
I’ve noticed a lot of news reports about how people should not FB friend co-workers as it’s a potential problem waiting to happen. The consensus is use a site (like Linkedin) for work friends and keep FB only for non-work friends.
I have a question about FB, does it have filters you can set up for different groups of friends? So you can make some posts visible only to certain groups of friends?
Why don’t you unfriend them yourself? Or if you for whatever reason don’t want to do that, why don’t you just hide news updates from people you don’t care to hear from?
Yes, and you can set them up so certain people don’t have access to post to your Wall, to view posts by other people to your Wall, or to view anything tagged with your name by other people. As I said, I work in the arts and I use FB for networking (I wouldn’t have bothered with it as a “friends” or social thing… I prefer real live friends face-to-face), so anyone who I don’t know well enough to be reasonably certain they’ll behave themselves (e.g. not posting lewd crap on my Wall thinking it’s “funny” or something), or anyone who may potentially hire me at some point, get only restricted access to my Wall/profile, so as to make sure that no one can potentially cause me problems with work/my income stream. For the rest, I keep in mind that anything I post is something that can be seen by people who might someday hire me, so everything I post in my own profile is, in some way, work related. Rarely, I’ll also post something completely innocuous, like a LOLcat that made me laugh (although being seen as a person with a personality and sense of humor is also important in getting me hired – it presents me as someone you’d like to work with).
One major flaw in the system: even if you’ve restricted someone from posting to your Wall, last I checked they could still post comments to posts to your Wall. How this makes sense, I have no idea. So at this point, the only plan I got is that should someone become a problem, they’ll get un-friended pretty damn fast, and their comments deleted.
I did defriend some of the real nutters and then other people started asking me why I had dropped so and so. I have all these people from my hometown that I intentionally dropped 20 years ago who are bursting at the seams to tell me what their cat is up to. I end up just not going on FB anymore.
facebook is buggy as hell. dont rush to conclusions