Written February 2009
by Cliff Feldwick
I got into this the way most of us get into things: a friend sends an invitation. “Judy has sent you a message on Facebook”, and you have to sign on. Just like the last time, with MySpace, or the business person you met at the mixer who asked you to join LinkedIn, or Socalizr at the cocktail party, or – almost anywhere at all. What started as a high-school and college phenomenon – social networking – has gone mainstream and is thus acceptable to be called “a business generating device”.
After all, wasn’t one of the keys to Obama’s election the fact that he had 328 billion friends, more or less, on Facebook? So this is not just for kids with nothing better to do nowadays – it’s for everyone with something better to do who wants to waste some time anyway.
Think I’m kidding? One of the “groups” that a friend (a minister) was listed on was “Stop Screwing Around on Facebook and Get Back To Your Sermonating” for those who were facing a Sunday morning deadline and were still screwing around instead of writing. Well, maybe they were writing, but it was on Facebook about how they were supposed to be doing a sermon. But you get the idea.
Especially at the beginning, you start looking for mutual friends with the person that invited you. Then you start looking at their friend lists and say “Hey, I know that person” so you send them an invitation to be your friend, and so on. Then some people find you on “friend finder” and it repeats. Spend a little time looking at everyone’s page or reading their posts and before you know it, hours of productive time have been lost. You can also get caught up in the “they have 58 friends and I only have 30 – I’m going to go get some more” if you’re really competitive.
Ah, but where do you draw the line. I looked at a request from a “friend” one day and realized that it was really a restaurant where I had been silly enough once to leave a business card with my e-mail address. Besides the regular spam this evoked, they now wanted to bombard me with Facebook posts. Ah … no thanks.
So that was an easy call. But what about the people that you know somewhat, or who are active in the community and you’ve met at a function or two but would hardly call friends? This stretches the definition of the word. After all, Rich Krieg of the Horizon Foundation is a wonderful guy, and we have 19 friends in common, but do we really want to share a beer and tell war stories? So how do you respond to a “friend request” from someone like that? Besides wonder how they found you? (Oh yeah, look at paragraph above about messing around and losing time on Facebook … but when you’re that busy and active everywhere, do you have staff that does that for you?)
So maybe there should be some categories called “friendly” or “acquaintance” or “halfway know this person”. For friendly, you get half a friend in your score sheet. Acquaintance gets a 0.4, and “halfway” only 0.25. Further definitions like “related by marriage so I better not reject their friend request” might be worth a partial as well.
Gee, why don’t we start a Facebook group about this, and spend time posting it? Maybe we could get some people to sign on and … please, someone douse me with a bucket of water and let me get back to writing a column, or actually trying to get some business.
Be prepared
So I’m driving along in early January and spot a bumper sticker that says “Don’t blame me – I voted for McCain-Palin”.
Excuse me, but blame you for what? This was two weeks before the inauguration. Nothing like getting your attitude out early and often. Yes, bipartisanship is alive and well, just not in that car.
Back to basics
So, what can you do when you realize that something you just downloaded, from a driver to an unknown whatever on that web page, has started messing with your system? Most times we forget about System Restore, a feature of Windows that allows you to reel back to an earlier time while saving your data and e-mails, etc. Very useful. In XP, go to the Start button, All Programs, Accessories, then System Tools to find it. If you choose “restore my computer to an earlier time” it will (unless truly hosed) offer some choices of past dates when it saved an image of system files that you can now revert to. Pick a date just before the regretted incident and try that. Not always perfect, but quite effective in some instances and an excellent first thing to do. You can always go back to today if you regret it.