Social social networking

I signed up for a Facebook account a few months ago and have slowly started to build my network. I sent an invite to a long-time friend, and here’s the message I got in return:

I have 49 friends in que waiting because I sent them this message…

I’m quite all right with limited friends on my facebook, therefore I have put limitations on who I will accept as friends. Ah… this is where it gets fun!

I’ll accept our “Facebook” friendship if you fulfill one of three stipulations: 1) Come to my house and watch me personally accept your request 2) If you live outside of Indiana, send me five “good” reasons why I should complete your request or 3) buy me lunch!

I mean come on… our friendship has to mean more than clicking “enter”!

I absolutely love that he’s doing this. With social networking sites there’s too much pressure to build up a big network and invite anyone that you’ve ever met. I’m frequently getting invites from old high school and college classmates that I barely knew then and haven’t seen since. It’s good to get back in touch with many of them, but does “clicking enter” really help us get connected again?

I went through a phase where I tried to rapidly build up my LinkedIn profile. What if I made it a point to have lunch with all my contacts at least once every 6 months? I couldn’t even begin to imagine how much more meaningful that would be. It’s just too easy to otherwise feel like we’re connected because we’re in each other’s list of contacts, or get the occasional status update when we change some text in our profile.

How many fewer Facebook friends or LinkedIn contacts would you have if you had to buy them lunch? (By the way, soup does count.)