h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

There I am, innocently writing an autoethographic essay on "Negotiation" and less innocently taking my divorce and subsequent affairs as my case studies ...

... when the Former Private Life's bloody Girlfriend shows up as a suggested Friend of Facebook.

F*** off lady.

Or maybe I should accept and ask her advice on the essay?

Oh, and here I was feeling guilty distracting you from studying

Facebook is odd. I think it keeps an eye on my emails - I let it scan once, and it keeps suggesting people I've emailed with, but never for friendship reasons...

I wondered if it suggested her because she'd done a search for me.

I thought Facebook suggested friends to add based on the fact that the two of you have some Facebook friends in common. Is your ex among your friends?

This has happened to me also, so no need to be paranoid (I think). Suggested friends: my ex's daughter with his 2nd wife (several mutual friends, 3/4 of my children and one auntie of hers (my ex-sister-in-law) and also my ex's 2nd wife (some mutual friends, which includes in her list "daughter" (my daughter)

<--- for the frayed nerves

We've no mutual friends on FB. I am friends with the lad I referred to as "the Stepson", but she and he have no mutual friends.

She's new to FB, I suspect she searched for me, or gave it the run of her address-book and it offered her up to me because of that.

Ben

Facebook suggestions have more to do with how much marketing facebook wants to be able to sell than with positive social interaction.

I saw a screen capture of someones friend suggestions the other day. Facebook was suggesting this person befriend someone's cats!

Cats?

I've had several requests to add friends from people I've never even heard of. Since I only go to Facebook once every couple of months, I don't know why anyone would want me for a Facebook friens.

You know what's REALLY annoying? Getting Facebook Friend Requests by email 6 months after you quit facebook! Oh, and I personally talked to the friend that was supposedly sending them and he said he wasn't doing it. Facebook was spamming me on his behalf.

I've wondered about that. The vast majority of my facebook friends are from h2g2, but there is the odd cousin or librarian. I just never think about going there. And the games and invitations to this or that cause really annoy me.

Teuchter sent me one (1) invitation to Facebook. Once she had done that, Facebook took upon itself to send me reminder after reminder after reminder after reminder...

Coming across this reminds me of why I refuse to join Facebook or any of the other "Social" sites (Except this one )

They're not without their merits. Facebook is just especially heinous because it's inherently evil.

Man, every time I turn around these days I seem to find even more reasons to be happy that I deleted my Facebook account.

http://www.macworld.com/article/151087/2010/05/facebook_addingapps.html

"If you visit certain sites while logged in to Facebook, an app for those sites will be quietly added to your Facebook profile. You don't have to have a Facebook window open, you don't need to be signed in to these sites for the apps to appear, there's no notification, and there doesn't appear to be an option to opt-out anywhere in Facebook's byzantine privacy settings."