Sunday 15 March 2009

Judging people every day

Not that long ago you needed to make hard decisions once a year: to whom to send Christmas cards. Who belongs to your (extended) family, are your neighbours worth a card, do you still want to greet your old class mates or colleagues that you saw 10 years ago and what about people you never see: the postman, your landlord.

Now you need to judge people every day: to accept an invitation or not in one of those social networks. E.g. Facebook was meant for friends and LinkedIn for colleagues, right? Now I got FB invitations from people that are not in my phone's contacts and from people that I have never seen in real life. Sounds like a close friend? How about people that share the same office but with whom you never worked or even talked, you know their name but that's it - can you really consider them as your colleagues in LinkedIn?

I'm a friendly person and sometimes making these decisions is very difficult. If i accept an invitation from x that I don't know that well do I then need to invite y that I know much better? If I reject an invitation do I need to explain why I did it? If I have way too many friends in a system, I can't actually follow them all - a recent study was saying that you can follow "only" about 150 persons. And then the privacy issue: I don't want to share the same stuff with my friends and my so called friends. I wrote earlier about my blogs: I have several of them and their themes are tailored for the audience. At the moment I can't do the same in the social networks - or should I create several accounts? Not very handy...

Any comments? Do you find it easy to make these decisions?

2 comments:

  1. Luckily my wife deals mostly with the christmas card problem but I have the same experience with the social networks. Facebook has the option to create different lists of people (close family, friends, people I just accepted as friends to be nice) but haven't gotten around to those yet and don't really know what the groups should be...

    Perhaps these questions are easier to answer for the net-gen people but at least I'm struggling with them :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks Harri for commenting. I do not trust FB so much that I'd create there any private content I would not my enemy to see. :P

    ReplyDelete

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