I just had to send this message to an old college buddy. In the comments, I welcome your thoughts on how I could have written this better, but I was getting some new application invite from her on a daily basis. Here’s what I had to write:
Subject: Favor
[Name],
I hate to sound like a jerk, but I use Facebook mostly for work and I get overwhelmed with job-related invites and the like, so would it be alright to keep me off the notification list? There are lots of great apps there, but my Facebook inbox gets so overwhelmed.
On another note, hope all’s well. 🙂
David
In high school and college etiquette classes, I hope they’re teaching kids the best way to write letters like this, because a) they’re going to need it, and b) I clearly have no clue how to write one without coming off as mean, condescending, pathetic, or all of the above.
Postscript: She was very understanding and sent a wonderfully sweet reply in return.
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Show comments Hide commentsDavid — You’re nicer than I am. I just unhooked from a couple people because they were generating 10-20 times the message volume of the entire rest of my network. I like your approach better, I was just really frustrated.
David,
The etiquette starts with not sending invites in the first place! (Also, on a side note, there’s some similar debate about auto-twitters whenever you publish a blog post…:-)
facebook’s applications are becoming a nuisance as people sign up and just blast it to all of their ‘friends’ since most apps have the select all option pre-filled. If I do sign up for a new app I try to be as selective as possible knowing you may not be interested in knowing ‘Which Rockstar You Are?’ and another ‘friend’ actually might. Short story long, I feel your pain and you were absolutely correct to make that request to your friend.
Ha! Of course I read this AFTER I sent you the invite to Which Lolcat Am I. I’m sorry…I HATE apps that require you to invite people and I never do it, but I just HAD to know. Thought that, as a fellow lolcat lover, you might not mind.
Hi David – you could also call this post “Why Facebook made me speak honestly to friends who don´t otherwise observe proper netiquette (sp?)”