As my colleagues will attest, I am totally anal when it comes to my table at work (and the table belonging to a former colleague – just once!). Everything is stacked in neat piles, unnecessary clutter is disposed of and anything that isn’t mine is returned to its rightful owner. Immediately.
I like knowing “my life is in order”, as I affectionately term it. I like the feeling that everything is organised and in its rightful place. And it is only natural that I would extend this personality quirk into one of my most oft-visited realms: Facebook.
Facebook has way too many applications. I have long since given up adding applications I will never use and currently only house a handful of word games, a movie thingy and some world map travel thingy. And a personality test thingy. (Sorry everyone who keeps asking me to play poker or get my own car or some such; it’s not going to happen.)
I only have three gift applications – the potted plants one, the hatching eggs one and the guardian angel one (because a cousin gave me the angel and I didn’t have the heart to ignore it). And unlike most people, I actually like the new Facebook because it lets me keep all my applications neatly in a separate tab and so my profile page does not overflow with the some 30 plants and 30 animals I have amassed. I am that anal.
Anyway, last week I decided it was time to take my spring cleaning one step further: my friends list. Like everyone else, I get people I don’t know asking to be my friend on Facebook. I used to add most of the requests, especially if we had mutual friends, because I didn’t want to offend anybody I might have met and forgotten; you know how it is with me and faces and names.
Then I decided enough is enough, so one afternoon I sat down, went through my entire friends list and removed over 20 of them. If we had only one or two mutual friends and I didn’t know those mutual friends very well, I removed them. If we had no mutual friends whatsoever and I had no idea who they were, I removed them.
It wasn’t easy, especially when it came to former high school mates – when you come from a (Chinese) school of 5000 people and three-quarters of them develop first names you never knew they had between graduation and now, it gets rather difficult to keep track. And finally, I declared myself satisfied. From now on, I’m ignoring friend requests that aren’t really friends. It’s a lot easier than filtering the list after.
Do you add everybody that sends you a friend request? How do you decide who to keep as friends and who to ignore without being rude?
I just ignore them completely. Sorry to say that but i do not have time to entertain these people. I just want to keep track of my friends, and personally i hate those application and stuffs, why do you want to send someone a drink which they can’t even taste it?
Ignore them :) I ignore from whom I don’t even know plus those annoying application. Oh, except for one application: Flairs (I like ‘em too much to delete it). I think everyone wants to see how many “friends” you have; the more friends you have, the merrier you get? Not really :-/