Friends, Connections, & Followers - Who Do You Let In?

Image by luc legay via Flickr

 Last weekend I spent the weekend with a bunch of old friends playing games, chatting, cooking, chasing children... and I didn't open my computer for three days. We didn't even spend much time talking shop since few of us work in the same industry.  It was a refreshing and much needed break from my day-to-day existence and it got me thinking about my various tribes.  At one level, the 30+ people I spent the weekend with are not my closest friends - I see most of them once a year and I don't interact with them that frequently in between. They are however old friends of my husband's and because we all stay in each others' homes when we get together, there is a level of intimacy that I will never have with many others with whom I interact on a daily or weekly basis.

Contrast those friends with my Twitter crowd - people with whom I share some common interests and with whom I chat very frequently but most of whom I will never meet.  For a long time, my online life has been mostly separated from my 'real' life. My old friends and family are only marginally aware that I have a rich online existence - despite how easy it is to find.

Facebook is changing all of that and making me think about how and when I would like all of my worlds to collide. I have a couple of groups on Facebook but that seems insufficient because essentially it just limits what one group can see.  Instead of segregating types of content (status updates, photos, etc.) I would rather segregate the topic of the content - i.e. some groups can see my family photos and other groups get my work photos - but that is not how Facebook's privacy settings work.

Now that my closest friends are on Facebook - along with ex-colleagues, online friends, childhood classmates, cousins, etc. - I'm struggling.  I'm often tempted to be a bit snarky about something (which my friends would appropriately understand as humor) but I know that people who don't know me that well wouldn't understand or would take it the wrong way...and maybe I shouldn't be snarky in the first place but it's something close friends often do. And as much as I'm a fan of transparency, part of being intimate with someone is sharing thoughts and perspectives that you wouldn't share with a bigger audience.  Now, clearly you don't need to share in that way online at all and I don't...but as more intimate friends start coming online, the temptation is there but the privacy is not.

The other question that remains un-answered is how a connection gets 'promoted' to a friend and vise versa. It's the same quesiton of "How do you breakup online?"  Different people will find different solutions to that and I am interested is seeing what choices people make that will collectively create some standard social expectations.

Relationships are going through one of the most dramatic changes ever because of social software - instead of leaving things ambiguous between people we have to articulate a relationship and that is emotionally risky.  One example is an old school classmate who while well-intentioned and friendly was emotionally needy, someone who could only speak at someone rather then with them, and was a time suck. Offline it is easy enough to fall out of contact and we had. Facebook allowed her to reconnect. Four years and a number of un-answered emails was not enough to deter her from it. And while 'ignore' on Facebook is an option, it makes it explicit rather than implicit and that is hurtful.

So, I end up ignoring very few requests but I also send out very few requests. I'm not actually tempted to connect with everyone that I could - I find the explicit connecting akward. I like the Twitter model much better - I can follow or unfollow someone at will and they never have to explicitly acknowledge me or grant me 'permission' to follow, except for those with private streams.  To me, it is much more natural - the way our ears perk up a bit when someone we find interesting enters a room.

How do you navigate your online connections? Do you reserve some sites for certain groups (i.e. LinkedIn for work contacts)? Do you request a lot of connections? Do you ignore a lot of requests?

Comments

[Daisy]

I'm still resisting Facebook. My daughter is on FB, my MOTHER is on FB, but I don't feel like I need it - yet.

[Scott Germaise]

You said, "but I know that people who don't know me that well wouldn't understand or would take it the wrong way"

I've been thinking about this a bit myself lately in the context of what it means to have relationships more explicit. Because that's what we're really talking about here; making the nature of that which was formerly implicit more explicitly clear. Or at least partly.

Because tools for classifying relationships are still nascent, we're getting some of what I'd call "inappropriate peering." Or at least maybe ambiguous peering. What does it mean when a 10 year old nephew and an old college buddy are both "Friends?"

Navigating this type of world is going to be a bit treacherous for a number of reasons. Not the least of which will be the changing nature of the relationships themselves merely by having them explicitly classified. Part of my answer is to keep colleagues on LinkedIn and Friends on Facebook. Some overlap? Of course. But at least it's a line, however weak. And either way, I'll delete as I can overly snarky garbage or that which might be offensive out of context.

The future will be more tools and control to define varying levels of networks. The consequences will be those flowing from having more explicit lines in relationships.

[Rachel Happe]

Hi Daisy & Scott - thanks for stopping by.

I'm tempted to separate out between LinkedIn and Facebook too but I'm finding it is not quite so easy since my connections and friends don't use the two sites the same way so they want all of their connections on one or the other.

But I agree, the whole issue of making things explicit is really a very strange and someone unnatural thing.

[Jen Zingsheim]

It's not easy, and I think we're all getting a crash course on what it's like to live in the public eye, where everything we do is transmitted to broader audiences than we're used to. I draw this conclusion based on a background in politics, where I'd see the same sudden realization of a shift in what one can say and when as we'd prep new candidates who had never run for office before.

It's challenging, and I don't know how it's all going to sort out. I have found that I think everything through before posting to FB: how will friends see this? What about coworkers? etc.

[Dan York]

Rachel,

I definitely agree it's an issue we need to think through... and I wrote something along similar lines last week at:

http://www.disruptiveconversations.com/2009/01/the-blurring-of-our-lives-does-learning-info-about-co-workers-via-facebook-improve-connections-or-feel-creepy.html

It is a new world of blurred connections that we are living in and I don't think we yet understand all the implications.

As to your questions, I do NOT accept any connections on Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. and only accept connection requests from people that I know in some context.

The challenge, of course, is that people I know in different contexts all see the *same* NewsFeed in Facebook, etc. It is indeed an interesting dilemma about how much to share.

[Rachel Happe]

Hi Jen & Dan -

Thanks for stopping by. Dan your post said it much better than I did!

I don't have any particular answers to this other than that I don't use Facebook for a whole lot because of this issue. I'll be interested to see how others navigate it.

[B]

Interesting conversation... You can actually have two accounts on Facebook and use one for your personal friends and one for more work related contacts. It's not ideal, I know, but works for me to have at least a general separation between my private and public personae. Maybe I need that because I am not twenty any more, who knows? I realize that my younger friends are much more open in that regard and easily share their weekend photos on FB for everyone to see. (I do not share photos on FB anyway, because of the copyright issues, I use photo sharing sites that allow me to set passwords per album)

[LucyJq]

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