I got a phone call from my Mum the other night to ask me if it was okay to ignore a friends request in Facebook. My initial reaction to this was – ‘you have Facebook?’ once I had recovered from the bombshell that my mum was voluntarily engaging with technology I got to thinking – what are the etiquette rules of Facebook?
I did a little Google investigation and these are the acceptable rules of facebook.
- You do not have to accept an invitation to become friends with someone you don’t know. Facebook is not a competition to see how many random people you can collect as friends.
- Do not write your status updates in local dialect i.e. ‘I cannae wait’ – this is not big or clever!
- Do not post anything on your Facebook that you would not want your boss or mother to read - you don’t know who your friends know.
- Do not poke for the sake of poking!
- Do not Facebook after a few drink – you will only regret it tomorrow.
- Consider other peoples feeling before you upload a picture of them. If you look stunning and your friend looks like they has just been dragged through a bush backwards the nice thing to do would be to keep that one for your private collection – or at least ask before you post it!
- Application overload, most people do not care that you are a Mafia God in Mafia Wars, have reached Mastery level 2 in Strawberries on Farmville or that you have made a peach cobbler on Cafe World and we definitely do not want to get a copy of your star sign every day. If there is an option not to publish you app update please do so.