Adequately Reserved

New Facebook feature idea: Friend-request acceptance noted as explicitly obligatory December 11, 2009

My idea for a Facebook feature: In addition to the “Confirm” and “Ignore” buttons on friend requests, there is another button that says “I Guess I Have To,” and if this is how your request was accepted, your notice says, “John Doe reluctantly accepted your friend request.”

This would be especially useful for:

• coworkers, especially bosses
• “middle” family, not close enough to mistreat yet not distant enough to ignore
• friends of friends with whom you aren’t really friends
• people who you think will comment with uncomfortably high frequency on your Facebook stories

In short: Facebook is attempting to violently collapse all of my parallel lives, parallel lives that sometimes took years to build. I like integrity as an ideal, not as reality.