In another open blog post, a Facebook engineer explained that “People You May Know looks at, among other things, your current-friend list and their friends, your education info, and your work info.” It’s impossible to say whether the site actually compares your detailed interests and favorites with theirs. (Facebook brass didn’t respond to requests for comment.) But People You May Know, unsurprisingly, made a lot of people feel even weirder about Facebook. I heard co-workers complaining that they’d been confronted with a friend request from an ex or someone they’d worked very hard to forget — and, even though the option to deny the request was always there, they were inexplicably annoyed that they had to even think about that person again.
Lindsay speaks!
In June, Jenny Feldman, over at Glamour’s Slaves to Fashion blog, wrote a brief post titled “Facebook scares me sometimes,” in which she admitted to being creeped out by the fact that you can “become besties with celebs” online.
Gawker recently unearthed Lindsay Lohan’s supposed Facebook profile. Her attempt to go “undercover” online, alleged the snarky gossip site, resulted in the alias “Lindsay Ronson.” Real or fake, the purported Lindsay was BFF with model Jessica Stam, Interweb “It” Girl Corey Kennedy, and designer Marc Jacobs. In what most people guessed was a response to a set of photos that showed the real Lindsay looking less-than-fresh-faced and possibly inebriated, “Lindsay Ronson” posted a Status Update that read: “Dont believe the hype. im taking my sobriety seriously, and day by day. It was 430 am!”
Attempts to ascertain the validity of Lindsay’s true identity were unsuccessful. “Lindsay Ronson” did not accept my request for friendship. (I’m not one of her brutally hip, famous, or infamous buddies, so why would she?) Most of Facebook’s lay-members, however, aren’t too concerned with whose invitations they approve. “I always accept friend requests, unless it’s from someone I don’t know,” confides a 25-year-old journalist in San Diego. Yet even she has boundaries; many of us have a personal code of Facebook etiquette, and you’re damned if you don’t tread cautiously: “What does piss me off is when I get a friend request from someone from high school, and I confirm them, and then I write them a note and they don’t respond. It indicates they only added me so it looks like they have more friends, rather than because they wanted to get back in touch. It makes me feel used.”
 |
Oversharing
Michael Tchong, the founder of UberCool, a next-generation marketing-services company based in San Francisco, says our country’s ongoing obsession with tastemaking is part of a larger collective issue he calls Control Freak Syndrome. Ever since Burger King launched its “Have It Your Way” campaign in 1964, Tchong says, marketing has spoiled the consumer into thinking they’ll be able to customize things their way, every time. And technology has pushed this notion much further, compelling everyone to become a heavy specifier, and to expect the same from those they’re seeking out.
