I’m back on Facebook. I probably won’t approve your friend request, however. This tends to upset people and oddly the people who get the most upset are the people with 1000+ friends.

Here are some reasons why I won’t be friends with you on Facebook:

– I don’t want people that I don’t know very well seeing my Wall or photos. At some point in the future, people may have an incentive to make me look bad and reducing the number of people that can access my Wall, and photos, is a good way to help solve that problem. I also don’t want to be worrying all the time about managing what people are tagging and posting to my Wall.

– When I have a small group of friends, all of the updates in my News Feed are from people I care about. It’s easier to keep up with everyone in my social group.

So that’s that. The problem is that a lot of people I know only have Facebook accounts, and use them as their omnibus social media/Internet presence and for these people, adding on Facebook is their way of connecting with me. I don’t see a good way around this problem.

The good news is that if you want to keep up with me, it’s pretty easy – I have a Twitter account, this blog, a quarterly newsletter, a Bitbucket account for sharing code I’ve written recently, a Delicious account for sharing cool links I’ve read lately, and a LinkedIn.

Also, there’s a good chance I’ll add you on Facebook if we’ve spent more than an hour hanging out sometime over the last year. I don’t ever reject anyone, just keep their request pending, in the hopes that we’ll hang out more in the future.

John Graham-Cumming wrote a good post about the same topic over a year ago. I tried to find it, but it’s been swallowed by the Internet.

Liked what you read? I am available for hire.