I am spending more than 30 to 45 minutes per day on Facebook now. I get “friended” a lot and I am getting many, many wall postings: some with curse words that I then have to delete and many messages from new “friends”. Most of these messages are asking me for meetings; for charitable contributions; for employment opportunities; for investment advice; for investment into their start-ups; for loans; for help; and for inspiration. My favorite was, “Thanks for friending me. I am a first time filmmaker and I need $ 850k by end of the week. Can you help? Do you use Fed Ex or can you wire me the cash?”
I have more than 3,850 “friends”. How can that be? Everyday when I sign in, I literally get 25 to 50 notifications – someone ”compared me to someone”; someone ”owns me”; someone wants to “play a game with me”; someone wants to “test my Caps trivia knowledge”; someone wants to “buy me a drink or a beer”; someone is “sending me good karma” or a “piece of a little green patch”; or something and on and on. I get friend requests at least 25 times per day.
I also get about 20 invitations per day that I have to “ignore” to attend parties and events that I have no interest in attending.
I have too many “friends” and because of it, Facebook is becoming something of a nuisance for me. It is a lot of work to keep up and it is a lot of messages per day from folks who all seem to need something and ASAP! Very infrequently are old friends finding me on Facebook. And very infrequently are really good friends talking to me on Facebook. They come see me. They call me on my cell phone. They IM me or they send me email.
I made a mistake in using Facebook as a public forum and allowing anyone who knew five friends or more in my network to come on in and get acquainted. As the denominator increased, that barrier of entry soon became moot. I understand that when you reach 5,000 friends, the network shuts out new friends. At the rate I am going, I will probably reach the limit in less than 75 days. That will be a good thing as far as I am concerned.
I should have been more selective in how I used Facebook. It is becoming unusable for me and not a utility. Am I too old for Facebook? Is it being abused by others? Or did I just mess up in allowing so many people to come on board? What do you think?
Why do so many lazy people always want a hand out. Get off your lazy ass and go to work. If you work hard you can achive what you want in life.
WTC
I think Facebook used to be a lot better until they let anyone and everyone ad their own aps. Some aplications are ok like the Caps fan one where I can smack talk my buddies who like other teams. The problem is the majority of them are stupid. You think after saying no a billion times my friends would stop asking me to join their vampire game or whatever. Facebook is nowhere near as bad as Myspace though and I’m not going to lie even though I’ve graduated I still love Facebook. It is nice to be able to check out my girlfriends pictures while she is at Auburn or keep in touch with my friends in Alabama while I’m up here plus my friends know they won’t get money from me lol.
Ted,
I found your site through the DC United blog (not Facebook!). You are not too old only too friendly.
I suggest that you set up a page (http://www.facebook.com/business/?pages) for your “celebrity” self (Ovie has one: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Alexander-Ovechkin/7681408117) and then keep your personal page for just people you know.
I think you could use the social network to influence massive social change. If you have a particular social passion you could create a knowledge base that empowers people to help themselves. You could provide guidance and non-financial assistance with the help of other like minded experts and societal influencers. In fact using the social power you do have is more valuable than any other asset you may have to engineer social change in keeping with your personal philosophy.
I really enjoy your blog.
I think the different communications channels have different value. If I have somebody’s phone number, I’m very circumspect about to whom I’m willing to give that number. I’m reasonably circumspect about giving an email address. I’m very open about a website. Facebook seems to have a culture of maximizing contacts. It’s more akin to postal mail than email. For people preceived as high value contacts, it’s probably closer to bulk mail.
Ted,
I’ve always been a big fan of yours, and you can look back the last 18 months or so and you’ll see a lot of comments on your blog from me. However, that’s what blogs are for.
Facebook, on the other hand, seems to be simply for wasting time. I hate the “notifications.” I added you as a friend on Facebook, because I think you’re a great guy. However, I wouldn’t be offended in the least if you dropped me from your friend list because you were tired of seeing things that say “Nathan Hays just commented on John’s wall.” As much as I admire you, we don’t really know each other in real life. I’ve met you once, and I don’t expect you to recognize me ever again. Why would you care if I’ve commented on somebody’s wall on Facebook? Who would really expect that from you, or anybody?
I have emailed you directly a couple of times in the past, with reasonable questions (like “why can’t I pay the difference to upgrade my seats mid game, when I’m surrounded by Sabres fans in the cheap seats?”) and you’ve never responded. Did I expect you to respond? No. You’ve got so many better things to do, like spend 30-40 minutes every day being irritated by Facebook. Is there any business advantage at this point in your career to belonging to Facebook? I’d seriously like to know. For every person you’d tick off by canceling your profile, you’ll probably tick off one irrational person every time you don’t respond to their stupid event invitation. Rid yourself of unnecessary headaches like Facebook. You may live long enough to accomplish your 101 goals.
This begs the question, “does Facebook make you an accessible owner, or make you look like you’re just keeping up appearances?” Why would anybody want to belong to a social site and have 3,000 “friends” who you have no intentions of corresponding with? Stick with blogging. It’s like the bumper sticker of the internet: One way communication! Tell the world what’s wrong with it, with very little real threat of rebuttal. Facebook, Myspace, and the like are basically the “sign my yearbook so I can show everyone how many people like me” of the internet.
Ted,
Pure and simple, Facebook stinks.
It has jumped the shark.
The only thing I like on the website is the attachment called “Caps Colors”.
Take care! See you at the Booth!
Mr. Leonsis,
As a regular user of Facebook, I would recommend getting rid of the people on your friends list that you don’t know. For public figures such as yourself, I would recommend creating a Facebook “Page”. On these pages, people can become a fan of your page, but that does not make them your friend. As a “fan” of your page, they have access to post on the wall there, but not on your profile.
I would also recommend going to Facebook’s privacy controls and turning off a couple things in the Search area. In the “How people can contact you” heading, turn off the “Send me a message”, “View my friends list”, and “Add me as a friend”. You can also control who you are visible to when people search. This will eliminate much of the issues that you are describing.
My email was submitted with this post. Feel free to contact me if you need any help or clarification. I won’t even ask to be your friend
Ted,
I think the reality is that you are a public persona. You have a family office to manage mail, requests to your foundation, etc. offline. Now that you have established an online “office” the same types of people are sending you “junk mail.”
You probably get as much of this crap offline (or more) but you never see it because you have people filtering it.
So the question you have to grapple with is do you want to really be “of” the community and engage with facebook yourself, or do you want to treat it like another channel and assign it to a staff member.
No judgment in this, just pretty clear to me what’s happened.
Ted,
I must be too old too as I refuse to spend an hour a day managing people I don’t really want to interact with…
I get that crap too. To be honest, I added you when I found out you were on, cause I thought, hey, I’m a Caps fan, it’d be awesome to be friends with the owner. If it’s that big a problem, I can remove myself from your list.
In a desire to reconnect to some people I too set up an account and did so with great hesitation. Within the first week I had to send out an email dictating to people that this wasn’t the ‘inside wall of my locker’ from junior high and that the many, many things you listed above were simply inappropriate from a standpoint that my employer could access it and deem it inappropriate content. I know people who have lost out on jobs because of the content on their facebook and my space accounts. It does take policing and I do think you have to have a clear sense of what you want to do with it. For me it has been a great tool in reconnecting with friends from my childhood in particular. In your case, it probably must feel like you are the cousin who hit lotto and the whole family you never knew is coming out of the woodwork.
Ted, try to oversee this stuff. You’re a great person and there are many who are trying to annoy you. I said that many times you’re the best sports owner in the world. Let’s go Caps!!
I’d say that you’re not a typical Facebook user. Too old? No. Too accessible? Probably.
Most people like to get friend requests. But if people started asking me for money or favors, that would get pretty old pretty fast.
Oh, BTW, I won’t ask you to fed ex or wire me money. A check will do fine
You could hire an intern to manage your Facebook account, otherwise let the de-friending commence
Ted, that (what you are experiencing) is Facebook exactly! It is what it is! It had some value to locate people you may have lost connection with, but overall, it’s a huge time waste Glad to hear the Grand Poobah of Web 2.0 agrees!
I just like seeing that cool scoreboard pic of you clapping and smiling with the Caps 3, Panthers 1 score.
I tend to only accept friend requests from people I actually know or have met or at the VERY LEAST had e-mail correspondence with. Otherwise Facebook becomes a useless spam box full of people you don’t know at all.
Clearly Facebook needs more categories than just “friends”. Fans, business relations, etc would be nice. It would keep updates clearly focused around those that you consider your ring of friends.
Wow, 3,850 friends. My friending rule is, only people I actually know, either from face to face contact or frequent email/phone contact (in the case of work friends.) I’d never make my page public! Most of my friends on Facebook seem to work it the same way.
Anyone who posted swear words on my wall would be removed from my friends list pretty quick. I generally click the ignore button when I get requests for games or other nonsense – I have a life outside Facebook, and that stuff’s for bored teenagers.
Good luck sorting out your page!
Ted-
I applaud your honesty on this issue. I can’t imagine what it’s like to be such a public figure on a site such as Facebook.
I recently went through my friends list (which is much smaller than yours, of course) and realized that I’d only not met in person about 25 people on the list. I actually thought that number was a lot higher. But as a means of comparison to yours, that number is only about five percent of my friends.
I think Facebook is great for reconnecting to people you haven’t seen but, as you suggest, can get out of hand very quickly.
You’re definitely not too old for Facebook and I do think it has been abused by others. Facebook isn’t the right forum for some of the actions you have documented.
I hope my feedback has been helpful. It’s definitely a difficult quandry.
Ted, I can be an independent filmmaker for only $425,000. I’ll even give until the end of next week and promise to set up a Revolution Money account too.