I recently joined Facebook and it has been overall a great experience. I’ve reconnected with a lot of friends from college who I really liked and missed.
However, there have been a few incidents that were odd. The most recent one is that this girl who I hated in high school friended me. It wasn’t just a casual dislike, either-- it was flat-out bad blood lasting several years. I was the first person she friended after making her profile, even though later she went on to friend several other people we went to HS with, including people whose names were earlier in the alphabet. Left me very much . When I replied, I sent her a note, to which she did not respond. We apparently have each other blocked from seeing anything beyond each other’s basic profile, so… what was the point of that? The whole thing struck me as being bizarre.
Also, was friended by a girl who I couldn’t remember, so I messaged her and said, “I’m sorry, I can’t remember how we know each other.” She responded that she couldn’t remember either, and didn’t even recall friending me. Huh?
I once received a friend request from a complete stranger in Thailand…with no note or any explanation. I ignored it.
I haven’t been on Facebook very long but I’m astonished at people who have accumulated hundreds of “friends.” Especially when these people are not in high school or college. Sometimes it smacks of “Look how popular I am!!” Yes, we get it.
I have about 50 friends, they’re all people I like and have interacted with in real life. I like looking at their status updates and I can’t imagine wading through 300+ of them…
Well…I can’t stand friend-whores – people who want to have as many friends as possible, and therefore will friend all of their REAL friends’ friends, even if they’ve never met. I occasionally get these, and I always turn them down - I have a policy that if I haven’t met someone in person, I will not add them as friends. I don’t want to see crap about people I neither know nor care about taking up the news feed.
There was this one girl who I vaguely remember from high school…infact the only thing I vaguely remember is she was a real asshole to me. And yet she was one of the first people who sent me a friend request when I got onto that site about 6 months ago. I declined it, and less than an hour later, she sent another one…this went on for a couple days and finally instead of declining, I sent her a message saying “who are you anyway?” and she replied 1 minute later and said “we went to high school together. Why won’t you friend me?” and I wrote back and said “If you didn’t want to be friends with me in real life, why would you want to on here?” and sent another decline. Nothing for about a month, and then I got yet another request from her. I declined it and haven’t heard anything else.
I also turn down EVERY request that involves a third party application. I’m not gonna clutter up my page with FREE DRINKS or “xxx has bought you for $yyyy” crap. Some of my friends take that policy personally…
One weird but positive facebook experience was that it allowed me to reconnect with someone who I haven’t seen since 8th grade…I remember her really well, but since she changed schools we lost touch, and it was by adding her as a friend and having a facebook chat (which eventually moved to regular AIM chats) we were able to reconnect and discover that we should have remained best friends all along…
The funniest (and weirdest) experience I have had on Facebook is pretty recent, actually. While looking for some old pictures of a friend who had recently found me on FB (of course, I want his current gf and ex-wife to know what a goober he was back when we ran around, and needed the pictures to post!), I came across a few pictures from high school. Since several people from my high school have friended me, I posted a couple of the pictures for fun. One picture in particular has a guy with a very unusual* name in it. That got a lot of people wondering just where he had wound up. Literally, this guy ended up being cyber-stalked, hunted down and told to join Facebook, just because of the picture I posted of him! It was rather surreal.
There are about 30 comments on the photo, and I noticed today that he has a facebook, and I added him. It was just very surreal to have such a reaction to a random picture. The guy was popular, but not *that *popular, y’know?
*unusual enough that when I googled the name, the only exact match turned out to be him. I wasn’t the one who stalked him down, though, it was another friend who googled him, called him and talked him into signing up for FB.
Looking through a girls’ pics. All normal pictures, vacations, parties etc. And then suddenly a self-photo where she is either wearing very skin-colored panties, or no panties.
I have precisely one friend on Facebook that I haven’t socialized with on a regular basis at some point (and that’s someone from SDMB, actually). My former room-mate has several hundred friends on Facebook, which is substantially fewer than the number of Christmas cards she gets every year.
Not everyone who has many Facebook friends accumulates them as a way of keeping score.
Same as fusoya. Girl who made my life at our school utter hell, who wanted to friend me. Yeah, that’s going to happen. Or people who I didn’t even hang out with trying to friend me. All very surreal because at that school I was the book-readin’ freak, a long way away from the person I am today.
The only times I have friended someone I didn’t know personally, I wound up unfriending them.
First was a guy who is a member of an organization I also belong to. Since the organization emphasizes networking, accepting his friend invitation seemed like the thing to do. He was big on the 3rd party application nonsense, then posting links that were not work safe type of things. Not something I’m interested in from some random dude.
Second was a woman who worked as a membership coordinator for another organization I belong to. She seemed to be friending members, and I thought that made sense so we could stay up to date about events. However, her status updates were incessant, self-absorbed, TMI drivel.
I’m not friending any more strangers, and some of my friends who are heavily into politics (on both sides) have been set to “tell me less about,” at least until after the election.
I’m a writing tutor at my college, and a few days ago I was waiting around in the library lobby for a girl who had an appointment. We’d arranged it by e-mail, so we hadn’t seen each other beforehand.
I wait around for about fifteen minutes, but everyone who walks into the library is intently studying, staking out table territory, meeting lab partners, checking e-mail, or searching for books at the catalog terminals. Nobody’s lingering by the armchairs in the lobby, shooting “Are you a tutor?” glances or actually asking that question. Everyone’s looking busy. Nobody’s looking for me.
This is ridiculous. I get up to leave, but suddenly the girl at the catalog terminal is making eye contact, asking “Are you Amy?” etc.
Yes. Yes I am. I’m the one sitting in an armchair, conspicuously lacking homework, waiting.
“Sorry I’m so late,” she tells me. “I had to Facebook you.”
About a year ago, I was surfing random peoples’ Facebook pictures. A friend of a friend of a friend kind of thing.
What - doesn’t everyone do that?
Anyway. I was at someone’s profile whom I don’t know. Sliding the mouse across the screen. And I slipped. Damned if I didn’t hug her. Whoops.
So I go back to my profile and remove the offending hug from my list. Then back to hers. It’s still there. I can’t unhug her. Mortified, I slink away.
Couple of days later - she pokes me.
Hmm. She is cute.
Now, I’ve been through my share of situations with girls. But this is brand new. How does one handle this?
So I sent her a message fessing up to the unintended virtual embrace. We exchanged a few messages. She laughed about it. I laughed about it. It never went anywhere, but it turned out to be fun.
Isaac has a degree in Philosophy and teaches in Korea. When I knew him he talked about “The Man”, wore cut-off camouglage cargo pants and a bowler hat, and was an all around entertaining iconoclast. A self-described “militant pacifist”. When we got out of touch he went to UAlaska Fairbanks, originally for psychology but “called them out on their bullshit” too often and had to switch to philosophy. He still plays guitar.
Steven is an accountant. When I knew Steven, he was a jock who I talked to from time to time about math but wasn’t really friends with. Genuinely nice guy that couldn’t seem to swing the “scholar-athlete” thing with the people he hung out with. When we got out of touch, he spent a few years in the Marines in the 'stans before getting out and spinning his MGIB into his current career in finances.
I was playing ShadiRoxan in a game of scramble when both of those two start chatting to me about what’s up (Steven because we’re both military, Isaac because it’s been a while since we’d had any contact). Their opinions on what’s been recently going on (elections, bailout, etc.) and what’s been going on (9/11, Patriot Act, GWoT, etc.) were unexpectedly similar.
I had sort of the opposite experience. I wasn’t particularly popular or unpopular in high school, just one of those kids that was kind of casually in the background. Being a typical angst-y “the whole world hates me and nobody understands my pain” teenager, I had a uniformly negative (though mildly so) outlook on the whole high school experience and everyone involved in it. Graduation was the last time I saw any of my classmates, so that was the impression that lingered with me.
Fast forward almost 20 years. In the last two months, there’s been a sudden surge of HS classmates joining up (there were only two or three when I joined six months ago), and suddenly all these people I’d thought wouldn’t have given me the time of day in school were now emailing me, saying how great it was to hear from me, swapping stories about their kids, etc. That really woke me up and made me realize: it’s been 20 years since high school, and I’m a completely different person than I was back then. Why should I be surprised to find out that they’ve all grown up too?
In a flurry of friendly email messages, the nagging little demons of the past were gone. It felt good.
I was bored one night and browsing around a picture album of an old elementary school friend whom I hadn’t seen since then, when I found a recent picture of him and a current friend. I was shocked to find two different worlds collide so suddenly.
Oh, you’d HATE me, then. I have about 4,150 friends currently. Facebook only allows one to have 5,001, though, so I’m about to hit the max soon.
I don’t know about 80 percent on my list. Never talked to them–only have them added due to applications they and I play (like Mob Wars or Battle of the Bands or Packrat)…because in some games, you have to have packs or gangs to have strength and you can only be in people’s packs/clubs/gangs/mob if you’re their friend…so yeah. I can understand someone who doesn’t use FB to play games and stuff not wanting a lot of friends though (or anyone they don’t know).
There’s two SDMB groups there that I’m in…and I’ve added a lot of people from that, too. Just in case anyone was friends with a Chris Lee Neal and always wondered where they came from.
In other news: Just search Chris Lee Neal if you wish to be friends with me, heh.
Regarding weirdness: I have weird things happen all the time with as many FB circles as I run in.
One time this guy got so pissed off that I outbid him for someone (in a bidding game) that he created about four “clones” of me–complete with the same profile photo. He then posted on a lot of the message boards on FB claiming to be me. It was an interesting week.
And here’s a story that is FB AND SDMB related. I am friends with One And Only Wanderers…and about three weeks later, I discovered I was friends with his wife as well! Through a totallly seperate application/game on there, too. We hadn’t even KNOWN we knew each other until, one day, his wife had a photo of me up on the screen and he walked by and was like “HEY, I know that guy!”. Small world.
Back in the days of early facebook, circa 2004 (when there were less than 7 schools on, and only a few thousand members), my friends and I made a joke page of me: I had been walking around campus for a few days with the Cold From Hell, with tissues jammed up my nose and (poking out of it) because it wouldn’t stop running for even a moment. I also hadn’t waxed my upper lip in awhile, so the joke of having a mustache ran wild…and I was reading mein kampf for class…and we took it from there. My entire page, courtesy of many talented and humorous individuals, became a sarcastic fake Hitler, complete with a tissue picture of me, arm raised, with my favorite book as “Mein Kampf” and favorite movie as “Schindler’s List - alternate ending”. It should be noted I’m (ethnically) part Jewish, and more than a few people in on the joke were actual practicing Jews themselves…
Within two hours, I’d received messages stemming from “That’s hilarious, I nearly fell off my chair” to “You’re a racist bigot and I look down upon you”. I actually got messages from some vague higher-up of a rogue Hillel-ish group on campus, asking me to attend a seminar on ethnic sensitivity. I told them to go fly a kite.
As per usual, people take themselves entirely too seriously, always on the lookout for an opportunity to look down upon others for perceived inappropriate attitudes, even when the joke is on them. Now with the presence of Mrak Zomberg impersonators and the pure blight of facebook spam, this little stunt seems small in comparison. I’m sure I’d just be the target of a “1,000,000 against Anti Semites” group. :rolleyes:
. When I replied, I sent her a note, to which she did not respond. We apparently have each other blocked from seeing anything beyond each other’s basic profile, so… what was the point of that? The whole thing struck me as being bizarre.