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I generally friend only people I'm, you know, friends with -- or at the very least met enough times to recognize. At some level of friends (300+?) I don't think

by mtigas 16y ago

I generally friend only people I'm, you know, friends with -- or at the very least met enough times to recognize. At some level of friends (300+?) I don't think the site is useful for actual personal communication -- which is more or less the only thing I find Facebook to be useful for. I find those friend recommendations to be just that: recommendations. I likely know them through someone or they're in my local network: have I met them? Do I want to be friends with them? Or am I just shamelessly network-marketing myself here? I'd love to see this on every login, even just for a day. The fallout would be hilarious.

cstross 16y ago
You're not using FB for professional networking, are you? If you're a professional you need to be visible. At the same time, you may not want random folks unknown to you to be seeing all your personal details, so you may lock those down so that only professional contacts -- "friends" -- can see them. That's how you end up with (checks) 893 friends (like me). It's a business tool, not a reflection of your personal life. (And that's before we get onto the jokers who select some random cartoon character as a userpic, but that's just another failure mode for FB's broken attempt to reinvent shared secret authentication.)
- rimantas 16y ago
  You're not using FB for professional networking, are you? No, there is Linkedin for that.
  - mtigas 16y ago
    That's exactly where I make that distinction. Then again, I came through college just as Facebook started picking up steam (my freshman year was in '05 when the number of college networks expanded from a couple dozen to practically everywhere). It's been, by original use (and force of habit), solely a personal networking site in my eyes. Things may have been different for me if I didn't join until after the "universities only" days, but then again, LinkedIn and Twitter had already gained plenty of traction in the "professional networking" arena by then -- and that's where I do most of my professional outreach (in terms of social networking sites).
  - cstross 16y ago
    Linkedin doesn't actually work (or do anything useful) for folks in my profession. Caveat: if you don't have a fan page on Facebook, you're probably not in my profession.
    - mtigas 16y ago
      I concede that Facebook fan pages are a whole other animal altogether. In that case (in terms of having an account to manage a fan page as a professional face, so to speak), then performing user authentication based on knowledge of "friends" (account connections) makes no sense whatsoever. All joking and discourse regarding "friends" aside, I think it's fair to have multi-factor authentication when it appears that an account has been breached. But yes, they could have implemented this differently. (See Gmail's "last account activity" alerts, which notify you regarding a breach once you log in from a recognized IP address but do not prevent access to your account: https://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?ctx=gmail&answer=45938 https://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?ctx=gmail&... ) I suppose I'm one of those odd, longtime users that wishes Facebook wouldn't try to be everything, hence the jabs at "I have too many friends" issue.

by mtigas 16y ago

cstross 16y ago

You're not using FB for professional networking, are you? If you're a professional you need to be visible. At the same time, you may not want random folks unknown to you to be seeing all your personal details, so you may lock those down so that only professional contacts -- "friends" -- can see them. That's how you end up with (checks) 893 friends (like me). It's a business tool, not a reflection of your personal life. (And that's before we get onto the jokers who select some random cartoon character as a userpic, but that's just another failure mode for FB's broken attempt to reinvent shared secret authentication.)

rimantas 16y ago
You're not using FB for professional networking, are you? No, there is Linkedin for that.
- mtigas 16y ago
  That's exactly where I make that distinction. Then again, I came through college just as Facebook started picking up steam (my freshman year was in '05 when the number of college networks expanded from a couple dozen to practically everywhere). It's been, by original use (and force of habit), solely a personal networking site in my eyes. Things may have been different for me if I didn't join until after the "universities only" days, but then again, LinkedIn and Twitter had already gained plenty of traction in the "professional networking" arena by then -- and that's where I do most of my professional outreach (in terms of social networking sites).
- cstross 16y ago
  Linkedin doesn't actually work (or do anything useful) for folks in my profession. Caveat: if you don't have a fan page on Facebook, you're probably not in my profession.
  - mtigas 16y ago
    I concede that Facebook fan pages are a whole other animal altogether. In that case (in terms of having an account to manage a fan page as a professional face, so to speak), then performing user authentication based on knowledge of "friends" (account connections) makes no sense whatsoever. All joking and discourse regarding "friends" aside, I think it's fair to have multi-factor authentication when it appears that an account has been breached. But yes, they could have implemented this differently. (See Gmail's "last account activity" alerts, which notify you regarding a breach once you log in from a recognized IP address but do not prevent access to your account: https://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?ctx=gmail&answer=45938 https://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?ctx=gmail&... ) I suppose I'm one of those odd, longtime users that wishes Facebook wouldn't try to be everything, hence the jabs at "I have too many friends" issue.