I communicate with people in lots of ways: face-to-face, email, via my blog, leaving comments in the blogosphere, conferences, etc. At SMX West a couple people asked “I sent you a friend invite on service X but you haven’t responded. Do you not like me?” Please don’t feel bad, because it’s not that. I’m letting a lot of requests drop on the floor — even requests from other Googlers to chat on Google Talk. I did a quick check of various social services and here’s what I found:
LinkedIn: 176 invitations to connect
Twitter: 671 requests 1060 requests
Google Talk: 27 chat requests
Facebook: 190 friend requests
MySpace: 35 friends, and it’s a fake account that someone else set up in my name (I’m not 42 years old, thank you very much ).
At this point, managing friend invitations feels more like work than fun. Many of these services have really poor interfaces for mass approving, and a while ago I discovered that if I stopped responding to friend requests, very few people got angry with me. So if I haven’t responded to a friend request from you, please don’t take it personally — I’m just a little socially exhausted.
By the way, I have a precise measurement of being Calicanissed. He told his twitter following to add me, and I got almost exactly 400 additional twitter requests. Jason didn’t know it, but I had my twitter set to the private mode that requires each twitterer to be approved. Thanks, Jason.


Socially exhausted - Read More...