Facebook ignominy

Warning: rant ahead...

I feel humiliated. Having joined Facebook a couple of weeks ago (clearly in the fear that if I didn't I might be the only person left in the western world who wasn't on there), I started building my network of friends, family, colleagues and business contacts. Last week, I asked a fellow freelance to connect to me. This was someone I knew from an online forum for journalists and who I had helped out by being a case study for an article of theirs.

So we hooked up. Then this morning I discovered I had one friend less... [note to self: should that be fewer? I need coffee]

The problem with Facebook is that you can see, via your personal news feed, when someone adds you as a friend, but not when they dump you. However, being the amazingly intelligent and doggedly persistent investigative newshound that I am, it took me less than 5 minutes to work out who had decided I was no longer worthy of them... A simple trawl through the Facebook group for the mutual journalism forum we belong to was all that was needed.

What I don't get is why. A week ago, this hack agrees we should be part of each other's networks. Now, they think otherwise. I'd rather someone messaged me and said "thanks, I'm flattered you'd like to connect to me, but I'm only networking with people I know really well" than agree to be "friends", only to sneakily drop me off their Xmas card list a few days later. But this person has more than 150 contacts on their network, many of whom they must know as little as they do me. So maybe I offended them in some way? I don't know. What I do know is that some people have no manners.

So now I'm sitting here developing all kinds of stupid neuroses about why this hack dropped me, instead of focusing on work. I don't know why I care - it's only a cyber-networking website, after all.

At times like this I long for a cigarette. But I really ought to earn some money instead of fretting about something that, in the great scheme of things, is really very unimportant.