02 June 2010

FB : Quality Vs. Quantity


Facebook, I would say is the most popular social networking website for now. It's an utility where you could get connected with friends, relatives, colleagues & everybody else around the world. I dont understand why I even bother explaining all this coz for all I know, everybody on planet earth knows what Facebook is.

As I mentioned above, we can get connected with friends thru FB. A lot of us found our long lost frens, ex boyfrens, old flames & even old enemies thru this website. In a way, it's a good platform to get in touch with everybody without even seeing them in person. Kindof cool actually.

Every now & then, I would be approached in FB by people I knew asking me to add them to my friend's list - whom most of the times are my ex-classmates, schoolmates & uni-mates. For these group of people, I would be gladly & happily adding them up into my list - who wouldnt, right?

Every now & then also, there would be people whom I've never known all my life who would be asking me to add them as friends. Okay, call me an anti-social or snobbish or whatever but I have this policy whereby I would only accept people I knew as friends. Not that I deter socializing but to me, there's a certain rules or etiquette in making new friends.

These rules I'm talking about is nothing really great or huge - it's just something called common sense. Look, you didnt even know this person but you are kindof interested to be their friends. Logically, you cant just go & barge into their home & expect them to accept your friendship - regardless of how sincere you might be. A simple introduction of yourself & your intention would be nice. Take one step at a time. You cant start running before even learning how to walk, right? Make the other party comfortable & accepts your friendship sincerely. Now, that's more like it, isn't it?

I figure that if you are interested in who I am and what I am doing in the world, than GREAT! Those guys who wanted to be my friends dont even have the decency to carry out all those simple rules & expect me to accept their friendship? Duhhhhhhh !!! And all of them I noticed have hundreds of girls as their friends in FB which makes me wonder why are they still interested in adding me up ? As part of their stupid collections I supposed.

I personally do not think anybody could maintain more than 50 virtual friendships anyway. I am very sure that those with more than 200 friends on Facebook would only be interacting actively with maximum 5% of them. I have around 80 Facebook friends and I only regularly interact with about 3 of them per week the most. In my opinion, unless you count sending a generic holiday letter to these 200 "friends", I do not think its feasible for most people to even try and stay connected with that size group.

By the way, there is a name for this kind of people. They are called "friend padder". As described in the Urban Dictionary, this is the definition of it : One who adds random people or 1-time aquaintances to their friends list on Facebook or Myspace in an attempt to look more popular than they really are.

To me, these kind of people have simply abused the term of "friend" ! Just for the records, most of them are guys. And why am I not surprised ?


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