If there’s a game or quiz I don’t want to hear about, I click ignore, and it disappears forever. That way I don’t have to see it when 20 people take the “What color is your aura?” quiz. Sadly, there is an infinite supply of quizzes, so they never really go away, but I think it cleans up my newsfeed quite a bit.
I don’t do the games or quizzes, I waste too much time online already.
Okay, if anyone is playing Mafia Wars, I need you on my crew. I only have 15 members and I’m not interested in fighting anyone, but people keep robbing me and attacking me. I’m just interested in doing jobs and it’s starting to piss me off. Send me a PM if you’re interested. You don’t have do anything with the game, just sign up for my team. If I can I’ll join yours if you like.
It’s actually a pretty good way to stay current with people. People I’m still actively friendly with often send event invites through Facebook. And it’s also a good place to post photos of stuff so your friends and family can see them.
As for old high school and college people, for the most part my Facebook friends are people I was friendly with on some level in school. Fraternity brothers, hall mates, ex girlfriends, guys I played sports with, etc. Sure, you get some randoms you barely spoke with, but you can choose to ignore them or limit their access if you prefer.
Really, it’s an opportunity for people who missed my wise-ass comments in high school to hear my wise-ass comments as an adult.
If you’re a certain MIL you’ll use it to leave negating, dismissively rude and/or patronizing comments on your DIL’s status updates and pictures of the DIL and her family including her husband (your son), and update your status with thinly veiled attacks and passive aggressive insults.
After this goes on for about a year with DIL ignoring the behavior, DIL will get tired of every time she turns on the facebook app in her phone to update & check in with family & friends where they’re at in their month long traveling vacation far from home and share photos of the cool stuff they’re seeing and doing, DIL will get tired of seeing the steaming turds of malice you enjoy heaping on them and “unfriend” you so you won’t have to see her updates or be able to comment any more, since you apparently just can’t help yourself and be nice or say nothing at all, and while yeah, she should be able to ignore it another year and then another year until either she dies or you do, it’s really just such a smack in the face every time and it bothers her more and more.
No one gets a notification when unfriended, so DIL assumed most normal people wouldn’t even notice.* Unless you deliberately seek out the activity of this person you loathe, then you freak out and break your computer when you can no longer crap on them over the internet. So you save up all that crazy for an hour + long tirade of nonsensical self-serving gibberish including accusations of how you knew Son was a horrible person way way back from childhood, unfriending your son on his birthday (no card or present for him either, that’ll make him sorry for being mean to his wonderful mommy by “letting” his wife unfriend you from facebook, ha! And block both of them so even if they wanted to send you a friend invitation they couldn’t.) and just generally acting like a nutjob. And it will all be DIL’s fault. And you’ll make sure everyone you know or have ever met knows this.
And yes, before the unfriending, you will tag DIL with stupid quizzes and drinks and notes and boring political links, because you have nothing better to do than be on the internet all day long.
At least, that’s how you’ll use the internet if you’re my MIL and a complete and utter waste of space. 
*Which shows DIL still doesn’t get it, even after 9 years of the crazy.
How I use fb is just to see what/how my old friends from high school/college/old work places/places we’ve lived/met while traveling are doing, since we’ve moved and don’t live near any of them any more. It’s been really neat to see who contacts you, and it’s been interesting to see how much some people have changed (and how little others have) and see their kids/dogs/fishing photos/random weird stuff. Stuff that’s boring if you don’t care, but that you kind of miss if you haven’t been able to see them in a while.
We used the fb app on the iphone and the ipod Touch to update our family and friends while we were on vacation and share photos–my grandmother isn’t on facebook but my aunt would show her our pictures and stuff, so in addition to all the postcards we sent, she didn’t feel left out at all since we couldn’t call like we usually do. We didn’t have a lot of internet time, obviously, and fb was a good central place to keep in touch.
Obviously, it might have been better to have been more out of reach of certain people, but since the last long vacation we took that we traveled out of the country my mother died and we didn’t find out right away and it made certain aspects of that whole horrible situation worse, I liked being able to stay in contact so easily despite the time zone difference.
So, fb has been a really neat tool and an unfortunate catalyst for teh familee dramaz, but if it hadn’t been that it probably would have been something else, since I think she just felt like she wasn’t getting enough attention and we were probably enjoying ourselves too much and deserved to be humbled.:rolleyes:
(Mods please remove this if it seems like threadshitting, perhaps I should have put it in the mini-rants Pit thread. I actually feel a lot better after venting, which is weird. I’ll probably feel guilty later, after the edit window has closed.)
That’s Twitter.
So IOW, Facebook can be just one more form of communication the restraining order can legally prevent someone from using to contact you.
Probably not. You can just block someone from contacting you on FB. Not like real life where such a thing is impossible.
Well yeah. I mean you certainly don’t have to keep a “friend” who constantly posts obnoxious comments about you.
No idea. The privacy settings can be heavily tweaked, so under the advanced settings you can “block” someone so they can’t pester you with friend requests or messages. I had no idea that you could actually block someone so that you don’t appear in a search they run until I was going through all the settings trying to stop all the Living Social etc. notifications, and someone on a messageboard (this one maybe) mentioned that you can personalize what information certain users can access from your profile or updates. I’m still not sure how that works as I don’t post anything on my facebook that I wouldn’t post on any other google accessible site. But it sounds like a nice option to have.
Anyway, a friend of mine having stalker issues with an ex-girlfriend has a restraining order from a judge that also includes an internet forum, but good luck enforcing it. At least on FB you have some control by adjusting privacy settings and having to accept friends for them to view items etc., but there’s nothing to stop a “mutual” friend from taking screencaps and passing them along to the blocked party.
It’s all rather pathetic really, but at least no one’s boiling pet bunnnies or anything.
Play Scrabble with Twicks and lose you lunch money.
Essentially, this.
There was a time when Facebook was very personal and private. If you wanted to know what someone was up to, you could surf on over to their profile and read their wall to see who had been talking to them. Good times.
Then Facebook allowed anyone with an email account to join, and subsequently, they started the “News Feed”, which sends updates your way, notifying you of the daily activities of people who you don’t really care about at all.
Sigh.
So tell your news feed to stop giving you updates about the ones you don’t care about.
EDIT: Under “options” at the very bottom of the feed.
Actually, you’d be wanting the “Hide” option that pops up to the right when you mouse over the annoying person’s name, you can always add them back using the edit options at the bottom of the news feed page. It’s weird though, I’ve hidden my cousin a few times (I just cringe when he updates with some sort of drug/obscenity/sex/deliberately assy thing, because his mom is on FB too and one of our mutual friends) and I’d swear he still pops up. Maybe it only works for News Feed and not Status Updates.
If you do it the way I suggested it wouldn’t be a problem. “Hiding” something only hides that particular little update thing does it not?
I have always just used “Options” at the very bottom of the feed to manually remove someone from displaying updates to me. Never had any problem with an updated status showing. Hell, the reason why I stopped this damn girl from displaying her updates is because she was spamming her status messages.
Every two damn hours it was something new and worthless, as if this were Twitter or something. I put an end to that right quick.
Is there an echo in here?
Huh. Your Facebook must be different from my Facebook, because when I click Edit Options at the bottom of the News Feed page I just get a box showing
“Hidden from News Feed
The following streams are hidden from your News Feed. Click “Add to News Feed” to see their posts again.”
with my cousin’s smarmy avatar below, no option to add others to the hidden pile or whatnot, just an option to add him back in. So, nope, it does not.
Well shit, you’re right.
Well all I know is I don’t get status updates from the people I have on that “edit options” list.
Ya know, back in the stone ages, Facebook was a network of something like 10 colleges, and you needed a valid e-mail from your school’s domain to sign up. You could see what classes your friends were taking, swap books, nobody knew when you got out of the shower, and nobody cared. When we wanted to talk, we still used IM, and did not communicate through status updates. But that was, like, 2004. I can barely even remember back that far. These days, we have what looks like Twitter with pictures.
It would appear so. Come on, people, Ctrl+F for your jokes!
I signed up on facebook recently and there was a flurry of people I haven’t heard of, thought of and had forgotten in 20-25 years.
I’ve just joined and one unavoidable fact has leapt out at me - I don’t remember a single person whom I went to high school with. Not one. 45 names from my class and I have no friggin’ clue as to who they are or what their relationship with me was.