Finding Friends
5 June 2007
I’ve been networking on MySpace, emailing lots of girls like you and me. Especially those that might be interested in the best girlfriend wisdom I spin on this blog.
You probably know that MySpace is about building an online network of friends - a community of like-minded people - so in my outreach emails I wrote a personal message along lines of, “Would you like to be my friend?”
When the recipient receives my message, all they have to do is peruse my profile and if they’re interested in being a part of my network, they add me to their list of friends by clicking “Approve.”
If they don’t want to be in my network, they click “Deny.”
It’s that simple!
However today I received a “Reply” (which is also a point and click option) to one of my outreach messages. It said, “Do I need to know you?”
I’m a bit stumped. What should I say in response?
I could email back, “Of course you need to know me!” thereby ridding my potential new friend of any doubts about me and inspiring her to click “Approve.”
But I suspect this person will need more than a one-liner. She’s already evidenced herself as high-maintenance (by MySpace standards) by hitting “Reply” instead of “Approve” or “Deny.”
High-maintenance in as much as she wants to actually communicate with me, and this means she’s bound to have more questions, which I’ll have to dedicate time to answering.
In particular I’ll have to come up with why in fact I am worth knowing.
And once I’ve outlined why knowing me will be worthwhile, I’m betting she won’t “Approve” of what is valuable about me within the context of a MySpace friendship.
In other words, I suspect she’ll require that I jump through a myriad of hoops in the effort to prove myself friend worthy so that at the end of the day she can “Deny” me her friendship.
If I let it, networking on MySpace could leave me with a chip on my shoulders. You see, I only have three friends - some members have over a thousand friends!
Maybe I should upload a video of me dancing naked. That’s sure to create a buzz and cause me to be friend worthy - no questions asked.
Then again, perhaps I’ll defect from MySpace and look further afield for (my)Tribe on YouTube or Friendster et al after all, somewhere in cyberspace, my community awaits me.
