Let's be friends

[andrewducker]

[Poll #1655310]

Context

Comments

[fearmeforiampink]

I'm in the 'don't have parents any more' camp, but I wouldn't add my parents on Facebook were they still alive.

To me, Facebook is a means of easily getting in touch with people I might otherwise have trouble getting hold of, and to a certain extent, getting to see photos of myself (generally at LARP events). I very rarely update my status, and when I do it's split between signal boosts and silliness.

I wouldn't need Facebook to get in touch with my parents or have a general idea how they are, given that I spoke to them every week, and there might be silliness or signal boosts that I'd be less likely to post if they could see it.

Also dwelling on it some more, there's another aspect to it – I can control what I put on my facebook. I can't control what other people do relating to me which might be visible to my parents – tagging me in a photo either as a joke or when it's something I'd rather them not see, or saying stuff on my wall/whatever.

Children? Again I don't have any, if I did... if they were very young I'd add them so I could keep an eye on them, if they were older I wouldn't add them (due to a combination of not needing it as a communications medium like above, and wanting them to have their own space), but would accept if they added me.

[matgb]

You can set your profile so that certain individuals or groups can't see certain things. It appears to let you set it so that the default is, say, friends of friends can see all pictures tagged of you, but that friend X can't see that.

The controls are very granular, but also the UI isn't as clear as it could be.

My sister is on FB, and I've not excluded her from anything. Within half an hour of Jennie getting home from hospital my mother had rung to check we were OK and ask if we needed anything.

While the specific timing of the call wasn't brilliant, it wasn't bad, and they just knew what was going on without me needing to ring them, which was useful as ringing people is always way down my list of things to do.

FB to me is a general contacts directory, if my parents had accounts, they'd be in that contacts directory.

And my father would be uploading a billion pictures of me and tagging them all, to Jennie's amusement.

[fearmeforiampink]

Indeed. However, given that I don't use facebook much, I don't know the filtering of it (compared to, say, how I know Livejournal filtering), and I've no strong desire to learn it.

If the situation came up where someone added me on Facebook and I didn't want them to see everything, then I'd look at such. But as it currently stands, I don't have to do that, and I'm glad of it.