A few tips to keep your sanity.
I made every mistake on Facebook possible, so this isn’t advice from a brilliant expert but from a ‘victim’.
So you won’t be a victim, learn from my inherent dumbness.
I opened my account with all my details. Name, rank, serial number and the flattering photo. Then I searched for all my friends. People I hadn’t seen since primary school, people I sort of knew. I guess I was starved for companionship.
I took all comers. Anyone made a friend request, welcome aboard.
So now, here we have a huge garbage dump of junk. Who did what on Mafia Wars, who wants my help on a Treasure Hunt, who is growing what in Farmtown, and who won at Scrabble. This is the ‘up’ side. The downside is the stalkers, sickos, and pure garbage that was being directed at me. I won’t go into it. I will say that I had to delete my account, change my email, and suffer world wide embarrassment.
Unlike making a fool of yourself in class where the worst that happens is schoolwide, this is the World Wide Web.
I was really down in the dumps until a friend of mine showed me how one really should use Facebook.
My friend began with a false name. She topped this up with a false image; not even a pretty one. People she really knew she sent messages betraying her truth, but as far as the world is concerned, she’s a shrub.
Friends who have nothing better to do than send alerts; “Georgia is growing peppers”, “Dave won at Scrabble”, “Keith needs your help in Mafia Wars”, came off the friend list fast, so that her Home page are discussions with people who can carry a discussion.
Every friend request she investigated. Most she ignored so that her involvement in Facebook is safe, garbage free and unobtrusive.
I went back on Facebook, following her advice. I used a nickname that sounds like a real name, and a photo of a something not me. I found my friends, and those who like Georgia or Dave or Keith feel a need to annoy me with their gameside adventures were ‘X’ed out of existence.
I now can enjoy Facebook.
If you follow this advice, so can you.
October 18th, 2009 at 11:24 pm
It’s sad that you have to be so paranoid in order to enjoy a “social” networking site…I’ve simply set my profile to private, limited my friends to people who are important to me in my current real life, and I don’t have any problem at all…
October 21st, 2009 at 8:20 pm
You’re much brighter than I was Lora Jean. If I had started as you did, I wouldn’t have put myself in the soup. You got on knowing how you were going to deal with the situations that could happen, I got on, not knowing the situations. Then I learned them.