This must be what it feels like to be old and unable to work a video recorder.
Awwwww, bless.
My mum’s on Facebook.
Aren’t you about the same age as me? 
Possibly (Are you 29?)
It’s the lack of simplicity, and the lack of intuitiveness. I have this constant state of "erm"ness on the rare occasions I am on the facebook website.
About sixty percent of my ‘friends’ are people I’ve never met in my life. I don’t know if a Message I send is broadcast to everyone (I seem to get other people’s messages about stuff that’s irrelevant to me)
I don’t know if I am breaking protocol by what I do. Is there any protocol on facebook??
I guess I just worry too much.
I got on MySpace and it scared me at first, and I’m still kind of a neophyte. I’m not going anywhere near Facebook.
Facespace. Mybook. What’s the difference???
edit: Myfacespacebook.
East-coronationdale farm.
My Dad’s on facebook. He’s 82. 
The people I share an office with (average age - 21) spend every spare moment on facespacebookmy, but I spend about one day tri-monthly on whichever one it is I have an account on.
Edit: as an example of my perplexity - I was on it just now, and I thought to ask my brother when he’s bringing his clan over to the IOM, but then I stopped myself because I decided this would be far too ‘normal’ a thing to use facebook for.
My husband’s elderly aunt is on Facebook. So’m I–people I’ve forgotten from high school keep popping up. So far so good; I just put an “Educational Anarchist” button on my bulletin board thingy!
I started a Facebook account for the office and it seems to be more work than it’s worth. Too many people accept friend requests that are unattached to that person or group or have no desire to help that group.
Facebook seems to be MySpace for grown-ups.
:dubious:
What do you THINK people use Facebook for? To schedule orgies?
Back in grad school, Facebook was our bulletin board for the most mundane of messages: let’s have coffee, what time are we going to the bar, have you finished your paper yet, etc.
Don’t feel bad. It’s “beyond” me too.
All my friends were on the MySpace and I finally figured out how to use that, and now they all up and left to go to Facebook.
I find that if you’re sort of unpopular, then you should just keep quiet on The Facebook and let all the popular people’s notes come through. I’m on it every day but that’s because I start Scrabulous games with everyone.
I’ll add you. Cuz we’re pals
Whatever else is true of it, it can’t be denied that it’s an amazingly bad website from a design point of view. It’s a great concept and well supported with third party applications, but in terms of pure web design it’s just godawful. I can’t think of a worse popular site.
You’ve never been to MySpace? However bad Facebook’s design is, MySpace is a million times worse. Even the parts designed by the designers are worse.
If by grownups you mean college kids, then yes. Originally one could only get on facebook if they had a .edu account, and their school had been added. Then they let high school kids join, and then finally opened it to the public. At first it was pretty awesome, you could only see people’s profiles that were your friends or that went to school with you. Then the creators got greedy, and they added regions. Then workplaces. I like it a lot more when it was more private.
It may seem intimidating now, but at first all you could do was put up a profile pic, send messages and write on people’s walls. Then they came out with the photo app, and it just started getting bigger and bigger. When they opened up the apps to any creator is when I seriously slowed my usage (which is also around the time I finished my undergrad, go figure), because it’s become more and more like MySpace every day. The biggest difference, it seems, is that in facebook you can’t make your profile available to just anybody (last I checked, it’s been a few months); they had to be either a friend or in a mutual network.
I’m 45.
I’ve disliked it since I “discovered” it.
YMMV
I feel the same way when I try to text.
Someone will zip me a message and it takes me at least 15 minutes to key in a single sentence. (And yes, I have autofinish or whatever those kids are calling it these days turned on.) And they’ll reply in a second - and I have no idea how they make their thumbs work that fast.
Facebook & MySpace just fail to interest me. Yesterday, a friend of mine finally pushed me into putting a picture on my MySpace page. It’s not a picture of me - but it is a picture. That’s as far as I’ve gotten. I’m not even on Facebook.
Get off my lawn.
I’m 29 and I’m no fan of facebook. I joined up for about six months and then quit because I couldn’t see what the point of it was.
Grandad.
Perfectly normal. A large number of my relatives are on there, spread across four continents, and it’s the easiest way to keep in touch and to simply keep track of what everyone is doing. Also, I just checked my sent messages, and a third of the first page of them are work-related. Some are straightforward messages which could have been emails but in many cases get read sooner this way, and the others are workplace gossip, very useful in a job where you see only a handful of colleagues on a regular basis.
It baffles me how Facebook can be considered poorly designed or difficult to use. The UI is great, and one of the best parts is that, unlike MySpace, users can’t change it. If I’m looking for someone’s phone number, I can find it quickly on their profile thanks to the simplicity of the Facebook design and its uniform application.
I’m not an “accept all” kind of person. With rare exception, my Facebook friends are those I know in real life, though I do use it a bit for work networking. For me, it’s a great tool for asynchronous communication.
To the OP, as to the question of whether there’s any “protocol” on Facebook, not really. Nothing is “too normal” to send via message, much like nothing is “too normal” to send via email. You can accept requests from people you don’t know, or not. It sounds like you’re putting way too much thought into it, or intentionally trying to make it sound harder than it is.