Comments on: Your 258 Closest Friends

By: Alec

Alec — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 12:04:27 +0000

The article is a good one and poses a genuine dilemma…what to do with friend requests from people you’d rather put into the past or at least not let back into your life. Either affront or lose. There are much more subtle ways of cutting people in real life with less lasting hurt done.

I agree with Erica though. Just say no to any requests which don’t interest you. I’ve specifically stayed off of Facebook as I don’t believe it is right to give a single corporate entity so much information about one’s personal network. The opportunity for blackmail or at least for unwelcome information redistribution (leaks) is too high.

Less personal online networking is fine (think LinkedIn or Xing). Or better to build it around your own online presence – a weblog.

But Erica’s issue of what to do with the past is an even more interesting question…

By: Kai McNichols

Kai McNichols — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 22:39:55 +0000

Fascinating, deeply even!

By: Erica Johanson

Erica Johanson — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 17:04:21 +0000

what a thoughtful, and thought-provoking article. About eight months ago, I set up a profile on Facebook–my first ever online profile—no wait, I take that back–I did sign up with friendster a few years back but I abandoned what little I put into that profile almost as soon as it began. Facebook, though, has dug its hooks in. Somehow it has managed to round up almost everyone I know and care about from high school—these are people who graduated in the early ’90s–and ever since I have been receiving weekly, if not daily updates and glimpses into the lives of a host of people who are deeply interesting to me–you know, people whose names invoke all those feelings of excitement, embarassment, and occasionally desperation, that was high school. I find value in this, although I recognize, as one of my (high school!) friends put it, that Facebook may be harmful to my health (Chelsea, thanks for that, it’s so true!). For me and others who graduated high school and college before the advent of Facebook, the harm (I think) is in dallying too long in the past, searching for or believing that the great big unresolved knot in your throat from those long-gone years can actually be untied by what little information Facebook possesses about your former friends and acquaintences. Not so! But reading this article reminded me that there are so many people for whom Facebook is a now-time forum for friendship. Even scarier… I have no trouble declining “friend” requests from people whose names I do not recognize because for me, it’s all about recapturing the past (for what little good / bad it does me). This article has made me worry, however, about how Facebook and other friend-ing networking sites affect the formation of friendships themselves for kids who are now in high school. Perhaps this is just nostalgia on my part, but I would hate to think that the era of face-to-face risks and rewards in creating friendships has been replaced by a new social order in which you can send out all sorts of feelers with little or no repercussions, forming and dissolving friendships with the click of mouse. It just seems so cold to me. I really value those gut-wrenching encounters from the past.

By: Tony

Tony — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 13:37:59 +0000

My favorite element is the requirement to rank your friends, and the hurt feelings that ensue when a new friend suddenly displaces an old one.

Also, if you start dating someone seriously, you’re forced to assess the status of the relationship and publicly declare your MySpace status as “In a relationship”.