Or: Why I have stopped adding people I know as friends on Facebook.

1. Hey, many updates in my ‘Live Feed’!
2. Hey, that’s a funny comment on someone’s status message/picture/video/etc!
3. Hey, that name/face sounds/looks familiar!
4. Hey, it’s a person I know/used to know!
5. Hey, let’s add that person as a friend!
6. Hey, perhaps I should ‘Add a personal message’ to let the person know who I am in case she/he has forgotten me!
7. Hey, perhaps I should let said person know how I found her/his profile in case she/he thinks I actively went to search for her/him!
8. Hey… The message looks over-explained, over-apologetic and hence, extremely creepy.
9. Hey, er… Delete.

I don’t add students either, though I approve friend requests from students. But that’s another story for another time.

Something I’ve been thinking about recently – it’d be nice if developers at Facebook, Twitter, etc. came up with options to allow users to streamline their messages so that users can decide which messages they want to broadcast (general audience) or conversely, narrow-cast (specified audience).

I know someone is going to attempt to rebutt this idea by saying something along the lines of “But Twitter allows you to protect your feed” or “But Facebook allows you to create privacy settings”.

Well, that’s not what I’m talking about.

The features I mentioned above are very ‘all or nothing’ in that we only have the options of saying something to everyone or saying nothing at all, when in essence, we might be in situations where we want to say a particular something to a certain group of people at a certain point in time.

Let me illustrate with the example of my Facebook profile. My profile is protected in the following ways:

• Only ‘friends’ can see my entire profile, so you’ve got to add me as a friend before you can view my profile, and
• Only people who aren’t on my Limited Profile can see my status updates.

Now, let’s say I want to post something about work on my status. The colleagues whom I’ve added as friends can normally see my status updates. However, this time round I might  feel that this particular status update isn’t something I want my colleagues to see, perhaps because I’m afraid they might ‘view’ me in a certain way after they’ve read what I’ve said.

At this point, I’d like to be able to have an option whereby I can decide: alright, let’s publish this status message, but let’s exclude this person and that person from knowing about it, for the reason I’ve mentioned above.

Think about my idea this way – it’s the digital equivalent of speaking in hushed tones in the office, so that you get to control who gets to listen in to what you want to say, and who doesn’t.

At this point, someone else is probably gonna ask: “What about using private messages then?”

Well, private messages are precisely that – private. They have a different social connotation from status messages i.e. we’d only use private messages if the information was strictly meant for private consumption. In a face-to-face context, it’s the equivalent of whispering – and whispering to a few hundred individuals at one go doesn’t really make sense, does it?

So I think it’d be nice if social networking tools could start to reflect some of the nuances in face-to-face communication/social interaction that haven’t been duplicated in the digital arena yet. It’s probably one of the issues that will mark the next step forward in the evolution of the Web 2.0 landscape.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I was officially a rockstar for a while because I added my 1000th friend on Facebook earlier today.

However, I checked back eight hours later and discovered, to my chagrin, that I only have 999 friends now! Someone either de-friended me or de-activated their Facebook account! But which friend was it?

I used to be able to tell because I have secretly been using this application called Unfriend Finder that told me where all my missing friends went. Sadly, the application seems to have been put out of service, for reasons that also remain unknown.

So I guess we will never learn the truth about The One and where The One went. Unless, of course, I chance upon the profile of this person and am unable to view it. Then we will know.

In other news, someone earnestly pointed out that not all my friends are real friends, or even people I’ve met. But I figure they make up for the friends who don’t have Facebook accounts.

Also, for all my children i.e. students, you are welcome to add me on Facebook as a friend. But I will put you on Limited Profile until you graduate from school, not because I am a freak, but for professional reasons that I can explain if you ask me in person.

I currently do that for all the Saint Gabriel’s kids whom I taught earlier this year, and whom, BTW, I still remember and have not forgotten. Guys: please study hard and come to SAJC and we can hang out again.

P.S. for the sake of parity, you can put me on Limited Profile too, if you decide to add me Alternatively, you can join my fan page.

I briefly toyed with the idea of temporarily deactivating my Facebook account because it’s taking up too much of my attention from other things. However, I changed my mind when I saw the warning that I’d lose my administrator status in my groups/events/pages.

I think that’s going to cause major chaos later on when I log back on to Facebook again; besides, I just need some respite from the information overload, I don’t need major upheavals and subsequent administrative difficulties at this point in time. Once I realised that, it made everything a lot clearer – I just needed to make logging in that bit more difficult so as create a psychological barrier/aversion to logging in.

Let me just say that I never knew deleting a saved userid/password could bring so much relief.

However, I’ll be putting you on ‘Limited Profile’, for the same reasons which I’ve explained to you in class. You’re welcome to put me on ‘Limited Profile’ too, as I think it’s only fair that way.

Facebook | Yvonne Koh via kwout

Look toward Tennyson.

It’s not something I normally do, but until I figure out what’s my comfort level with students stepping into what is a private space to me, I’ll have to impose a hard and fast rule: no student adds to my Facebook account under any condition whatsoever.

But don’t be sad – I still consider you my friend in real life okay… Just that you have to call me Sir. Hohoho!

It fits my needs because I read a lot of stuff using Google Reader, and I like to share what I read with people, but find the whole copying and pasting of links very laycheh. So far, have only been able to port my ‘reading lists’ into my Facebook feeds, but haven’t been successful in automatically porting it into my blog feed – until now.

Hope you enjoy reading my shared items, or if you blog and use Google Reader too and have been looking for something like this, hope this has been a useful discovery for you too!