I hate Facebook. There. I said it. It’s just the most painfully difficult site I’ve ever used on the Internet (and that includes MySpace). To whit: Not long ago I got an e-mail alerting me to the fact that an old friend from college named Michelle Sweet had added me as a friend. Gee, that’s nice. I’d like to add good ol’ Mitchell (as we called her) to my list. I cannot for the life of me figure out how to do that. Searching for her name brings up nothing. Browsing through 160+ profiles from my graduating class brings up nothing. How the hell did I get an e-mail from her if she’s not on there? Also, I tried to join the “Sydney” network and it asked me to provide a “valid Sydney e-mail address.” What the hell does that mean? I put it my normal one and got rejected. Why is everything on this site so damned difficult?
7 responses
I think the Sydney one is specific to Sydney University, so you need a uni email. MH would know. I looked at Facebook and thought ick, not friendly at all.
i’m on facebook ang i just use my gmail
The sydney network is for peope at sydney uni, I think… I think they mean you need a valid usyd email address. I must admit I find it strange too. And I’m annoyed that I can join both the Aus and NZ regional networks at the same time, and if I change to one I can’t change back for a period of time. I want to find people in NZ and keep in touch with people in Aus at the same time. But if you’ve acepted a friend invite you shoud see mitchell in your list of friends, and be able to click on her photo to get to her profile.
I don’t really get Facebook. I can’t figure out how to turn off the notifications that my ‘friends’ have added this or that application – why would I care? I have the notifications turned to low but still they appear… I”m not sure what th advanatges of it are for me.
Ah, thanks for that, M-H. Makes more sense. I’d searched for “Sydney” as a network and it came up, but without any indication that it was a university instead of a region.
The thing with my friend Michelle is just annoying. I get e-mails from Facebook all the time asking me to confirm people as my friends, but this one wasn’t. It was just saying that she’d added me, without any link to confirm or anything. And I just can’t find her at all. The only explanation I can think of is that she’s since deleted her account.
I’ve been on Facebook for a while now, I really only joined to see if anyone interesting from my uni was on there. I WASN’T ASKING FOR FRIEND INVITES, AMY! 🙂
AHA! The friend notification I just got from Amy was very similar to the one I got from Michelle. Did you just type my name in or something, Amy? It doesn’t have a verification link; I think it’s actually an invitation to join Facebook. Except I’m already in there! So when I log in, you don’t actually pop up as a friend request or anything. (That explains the weird notification format, but still doesn’t change the fact that I can’t actually find Michelle anywhere on the site.)
So basically, this stupid system will let you add friends who aren’t on Facebook, but it doesn’t actually check to make sure they’re not already on there. *sigh*
Anyway, I’m on there as “Kristine Howard”. My email address is actually pants AT alumni DOT nd DOT edu. (So I could join my uni network.)
You can change the amount of notification emails on face book by going into account and then click on the notification tab. Uncheck as many as you like.
You can add friends that are already on Facebook, though I agree there’s a bit of a learning curve in the UI (I also did the exact same thing with the Sydney network– it took me a bit to figure out that was Sydney Uni). There are a couple of tools for importing your email address book into Facebook & it’ll look them up. In addition, you can just use the search box under the Facebook logo on the lhs & type in a name or email address in there. If your friend doesn’t show up in the results, they might have some privacy settings on that exclude them from the search results.