JyoNah

Or at least, thats what it sounds like when you read what is pictured bellow.

Add Anybody as a Friend?

I first encountered this window when reading through a FacebookFacebook message thread concerning a party we were trying to plan. (And boy has that been a pain.) I noticed that the party planner, who had initially sent out the message, included the E-Mail address of a friend who did not keep an account on Facebook. Right next to his address in the “To” field of the message was a link that said “(add as friend)”

The message seemed to indicate that I could set up a sort of proxy-profile for this friend of mine, even if he didn’t want me to. Asking for a full name, email address and birth date. The birth date I found a rather peculiar thing to ask for. I hardly know any of my friend’s exact date of birth – that’s something I usually rely on Facebook for. Though I suppose it may have to do with the legalities of facebook usage and age.

Facebook has been pretty flippant with people’s privacy lately. Concerns over their new Open Graph launch have been expressed in nearly every corner of the bloggosphere, to the point that some are deactivating their Facebook accounts. What are these people going to do if their friend’s just end up adding them back?

Rusty the Tape Dispeser

I experimented with the feature using my friend ‘Rusty” the Tape Dispenser as a test subject. (For those of you who have been concerned, no. The images above do not indicate a real person.) I sent a test message to both myself, and Rusty’s email address. I saw the message pictured above, and Rusty got the following email:

On my end of things, in the message, I saw the option to add the email address as a friend – just like before. (I had looked for the option to do this elsewhere on the website and couldn’t seem to find it.) I clicked on the link, and filled out Rusty’s information. (Rusty is a 20 y/o Italian tape dispenser) When I was done, I was informed that “Rusty Bensen” had been added to my friends list. That’s when Rusty got THIS email:

I set about searching for what impact adding Rusty to my friends list had on Facebook. A search for the name “Rusty Bensen” returned NO results. When I tried to send a message to Rusty by simply typing in his name, I got nothing. I even went to try and tag a photo of him, but got no result:

So in the end, it seemed like adding your friend to Facebook was just a fancy way to get people to send invitations, but with the way Facebook has been going, you never know.

What about you?

If this feature worked like it initially sounded, would it be something you would use? Are you okay with Facebook’s recent changes in privacy?

FacebookFacebook can be an INCREDIBLY useful social utility, but for all its potential it can be hard to figure out. Fortunately, there are little things you can do to help make the chaos a lot easier to manage.

Don’t Want to Go

The Facebook Events application is great. Its a nice, easy way to let all your friends know about an event you’d like them to come to, and if you’re feeling like the whole world might as well attend, all your friends have to do is invite all of THEIR friends and so on and so forth. Unfortunately, when you want to share an event, its easier to invite everybody than to sort through your friends-list and only invite the people you think would be interested. This means that quite often, we get invitations to events we don’t even care about. Sally’s party that you can’t make it to is one thing, but “Inform those in your life who are dumb to never reproduce” day is another matter entirely.

Don’t Want to Know

Clearly, “Yes” and “Maybe” aren’t the way to get rid of this, but clicking “No” isn’t going to completely make it go away either. You’ve been invited, and this event is now on your Facebook calendar, and every event on your Facebook calendar will show up on your Home-Page in the “Events” section starting three days before the event occurs to the moment it ends.

To prevent this, take a look a the blue text beneath the “Yes”, “No” and “Maybe” buttons. The little blue hyper-link there reading “Remove from my Events” will remove every scrap of that event from your Facebook experience.

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