Facebook Embarrassments

I was talking to a friend who refuses to join Facebook. They said that part of the reason they didn't want to join was how competitive it seemed: “I have 46 friends.” “I have 87 friends.” “I have 99 friends.”

And what's the first line of my Feliciter article about Facebook? “I have exactly 159 friends online.”

In my defense, I was trying to illustrate the power of Facebook to link disparate groups – I have friends from high school, undergrad, grad school, professional colleagues. Plus probably 1/3 (?) of those friends are people I've never met in real life but who friended me because I created a group for people from Saskatchewan (the first on Facebook – yay me!) and blatantly invited anyone who joined the group to friend me.

This was back when I first joined Facebook a year ago and not a lot of other people I knew were on there so it was more of a way to have something to look at when I logged in.

Now that I have lots of “real” friends on Facebook, I actually regret having so many “Facebook friends” and sometimes think of blocking them or un-friending them. But that seems very un-Saskatchewan of me somehow.

Plus I may or may not been un-friended for the first time as well (that I know of.) Facebook doesn't notify you if someone you add never adds you or if someone who has added you as a friend later removes you.

But I was paging through one of the many UWO FIMS groups' member lists the other day, I saw someone I thought was already a friend with a “Add To Friends” link beside their photo.

Hmm, what to do? Did I just mistakenly think I'd added them? If they dropped me, do I dare risk the humiliation of re-adding them? Part of me hopes they did de-friend me so I can send an add request just to see what they do (yes, I know that would be verging dangerously close to that guy who sends 50 Add requests to someone without getting the message, “We were never friends in real life, we'll never be friends on Facebook.”)

The friend I mentioned above related another funny story – two friends had a massive falling out but never dropped each other as Facebook friends. Then one day, one of them got an invite to a party that the other was having. “Oh, I guess we're friends again!” the person thought happily and responded that they would attend.

“You stupid ass,” the reply came back. “I just invited everybody in my Facebook friends list. We are *definitely* not friends again.” Ooops!

Oh, one other embarrassment. I started a group called “Saskatchewan Mafia” and can't believe that its grown to nearly 1500 members. I put in a bit of time (but not a lot) changing the group's default photo, adding questions for discussion, etc. But soon after I started my group, a group dedicated solely to the topic of “bunny hugs” (hoodies to anyone outside Saskatchewan) was started and has grown to nearly 5000 (!) members. Isn't that crazy? It would be un-Saskie of me to be competitive (I joined that group too – it's hilarious. All kind of anecdotes about the reactions former Saskies get when they say “bunny hug”) but unreal that they're lapping me by so much.

So that's my daily Facebook-themed post. In other news from the real world, I'm going to be a father in less than a month.

Here's my impression of me during the last eight months: