Socially Acceptable: How to Cyber Friend

The saying a friend in need is a friend indeed is so true, one usually find out who their real friends are when they are facing a crisis. What if there is no dark clouds brewing in the horizon, how do one tell who's a real friend and who's a dud?

With the increasing popularity of social networking sites such as Facebook or MySpace, one can be friend with anyone by sending a Friend Request, thus further blurred the true meaning of friendship.

Are you really friends with someone whom you met once and perhaps never meet again? Do you really want to invite this person into your life (or rather, online profile page)? What was the ulterior motive of adding or sending a Friend Request to such person? Worst, do you even like this person who sent the Friend Request?

I am guilty for happily adding many long lost friends I've found via Facebook, they are people I went to high school or university with and have lost touch, as well as ex-colleagues and ex neighbours. At least I had real interactions with these people in the past - we talked, played, studied, worked and socialised - they were considered as friends at some stage of my life.

We were friends back in a time where there is no internet or mobile phones, heck, even with email people get too lazy to write, nonetheless it was good to see them again, even if it's on the internet. Sadly, I can't say too much vice versa, I couldn't get back the connection with most of them no matter how hard I tried to get them talking.

I am also guilty for greedily adding many people I hardly knew, people I met only once and perhaps never to meet again, as friends. My ulterior motive? To make my Friend List look longer... Seriously, being a new kid on the block and an unemployed bum in Hong Kong, I wish to pursue new friendship.

There are a lot of hits and misses in this department, the majority are just a bunch of young professionals who seem to be in a race to win the biggest-friend-list championship. There are a few pleasant surprises of course, these are the people who don't judge me by the size of my wallet or my status as an unemployed bum, they made an effort to get to know me, and I am very glad to have met them.

So the question now is, what do I do with the duds in my friend list? What are the socially acceptable ways to deal with them? While I think it is ok to clean up your friend list by removing the undesirables, how does that make them feel to be removed? Since I doubt these people treated me as a friend, do they even notice? Do they mind? What will happen if you bumped into them again? What will they think of you? Do you really care?

The above questions linger on my mind as there is no black and white on this issue. I mean I would only remove those I think is not worthy to be called a friend, based on the amount of interactions I had with them on and off line. I don't want to know what they are up to, nor I want to share my information with them.

At the end of the day, I think we as humans are bound by an unspoken social code to be nice; removing people from friend list online is not one of the thing perceived as being nice, therefore it is not quite socially acceptable, especially on a social networking website!