Keep Facebook Fun! or No, I won’t be your friend.

After a year or two of “social network fatigue”, a new network is spreading virally again: Facebook. Everyone’s talking about how Facebook is spreading (again) like wildfire. A couple of years ago, it spread through colleges around the US and a staggering majority of college students now have a facebook.

Now, the old people are arriving, and more specifically, everyone in my LinkedIn network is asking to be my facebook friend. (yes, I just called all of you old).

This has made me pause and ask “What do I want my Facebook network to be?”. I’m on a lot of services and I actually have different groupings of friends on each. I use one service for my long lost NYC friends. I use LinkedIn for my professional network, and what do I use facebook for?

So I just started doing the unimaginable, I’m turning down invitations from people I know well. I’m clicking “REJECT” to those professional contacts. I want my facebook to be my closest friends (professional and personal). I want it to be a fun place, I want to know what music they are listening to, what they are doing, restaurants, fun stuff. I’ll use a professional network for those professional contacts. I want to keep facebook fun! LinkedIN CEO Bill Nye unsurprisingly agrees.

Since I do want to be friends with you (I like you, trust you and want to keep in touch), I’ll kindly invite you to LinkedIn instead. So don’t be surprised to get a REJECT from Facebook and a INVITE from linked in.

I wonder if other people are feeling the same. What do you use Facebook for vs. linkedIN??

Related Reading:

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  • 6 thoughts on “Keep Facebook Fun! or No, I won’t be your friend.”

    1. I’m with you. I have my friends on Facebook and my more professional contacts on LinkedIn. Of course, I’m not exactly getting requests left and right on either one… I’m just more popular in the Real World.

    2. I’ve used Facebook to keep in touch with all the overseas counselors that have worked here at camp over the summers – keeps me young by the way. I too am on several sites – as you know – and use them to seperate people just like you. Birds of a feather?

    3. Whoa!

      Linked in is run by Bill Nye, the Science Guy? Cool! So I can use it to blow stuff up too?

      (ok, sorry, i know you meant Dan Nye, but i thought it was a funny slip.)

    4. I use Facebook to keep in contact with friends. Quite frankly the applications are really ticking me off. So many requests to add inane applications!

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