Kim kept bug­ging me. “You should join Face­book. Everybody’s get­ting on Face­book. You’ll find peo­ple on Face­book that you haven’t talked to in years. You should join Facebook.”

Face­book is a social net­work­ing site, mean­ing that peo­ple that you talk to already on a reg­u­lar basis can now have another way of talk­ing to you on a reg­u­lar basis. You can chat, email, do lit­tle appli­ca­tions (I have book reviews for books I’ve read/am read­ing on there) and other stuff. It’s pretty easy to con­nect with peo­ple but not so easy to always find peo­ple you’re look­ing for. Say you have a friend named “Bill Smith”. Good luck find­ing the cor­rect Bill Smith, espe­cially if he didn’t include a pic­ture of him­self in his profile.

And peo­ple who are friends with other peo­ple that you’re already friends with will then try to add you as their friend (yes, it sounds com­pli­cated). Some­one will want to add you to their “friend list” and then they’ll email you ask­ing your per­mis­sion. You can ignore, deny or approve their request. If you approve it you get added to their friend list, and then you two are “friends” in the vir­tual sense.

It only gets weird when some­one that you don’t know sud­denly emails you ask­ing to be friends. I got a request the other day from some­one that I lit­er­ally had no idea who they were. Some girl. Sup­pos­edly we went to high school together. Did I rec­og­nize her? Nope.

So what do you do then? Be a jerk and not add her? Deny her? Or just ignore her? Or do you say, “Okay, let’s take the plunge and see where this goes.” I more often than not ignore these peo­ple. I don’t think of myself as a jerk; I just don’t want to be friends with every­one. I’m pretty selec­tive. If I like you and I have some idea of who you are, then sure, I’ll add you, but if you’re like this girl that I’ve never met before, for­get it sis­ter, ain’t gonna hap­pen no mat­ter what tan­gen­tial link we share. It’s like some­one walks up to you on the street or in a bus and just starts talk­ing to you. “Hey, you look famil­iar.” Can’t place them to save your life. Then they say, “Let’s be friends.”

I like to know who my friends are and those who aren’t my friends. What’s so wrong with that? So if I don’t know you and you want to be my friend on Face­book, think twice.

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