North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

[Road's End Farm <organic87@frontiernet.net>]

On Feb 23, 2010, at 3:11 PM, Ginda Fisher wrote:

> Yes, facebook asks you frequently to give it your address book so it  
> can find people you know, and then it sends friend requests to every  
> address there.
>
> But you don't annoy people by turning them down, as facebook doesn't  
> actively tell you that someone has declined a request.  So if it  
> sent requests you didn't even know about (which seems to happen  
> often) they'd never notice that you declined.


But don't they notice that you didn't friend them, even if there isn't  
any explicit refusal?

If I had gone to the trouble of joining Facebook because of such a  
request, and the person then ignored me, I would also be annoyed.

Email sent to everybody in one's address book is almost always spam,  
as generally most of them don't want it. It seems to me that what  
you're saying is that Facebook routinely spams people, and many of the  
people on facebook go along with this. It must be possible to avoid  
going along with it; I know people who are on facebook, and I never  
get such emails from them.

-- Are you saying you expect them only to send friend requests to  
people who are already on Facebook themselves, and only through the  
Facebook system? I think even that still has most of the above  
problems; but they're also (unless the messages Jim and I get aren't  
Facebook at all) sending email to people not on Facebook in the first  
place. That's what I'm referring to as spam.

-- Rivka; Finger Lakes NY, Zone 5 mostly
Fresh-market organic produce, small scale