Sunday, December 2, 2007
It’s about who you know
Like many people immersed in social and new media technologies, I regularly receive friend requests through services like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. About 60% of the time, I know or have met the person from whom the request originates. The rest of the requests come from people I’ve never heard of.
So, how do I know if these people are friends? I don’t. My approach is to assess their existing friends and followers for people I trust. If I see a name like Bob Goyetche or Whitney Hoffman (among others), I immediately accept the request.
How does your trusted network work for you?
December 3rd, 2007 at 8:59 am
Since I maintain a pretty low key online presence, I don’t really receive that many friend requests from anyone I have a question about. Now if certain members of my family ever started sending me friend requests then I might have to think a bit more about whose requests I accept. I guess the same would be true for coworkers. Ah the value of a pseudonym…
Meanwhile, Cory Doctorow wrote an interesting and somewhat related article - How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers will Kill Facebook.
So I guess my short answer is I have no need to assess the validity of friend requests but really the requests I’m more worried about are those from people I do know not those I don’t.