If you friend me, I will probably friend you back provided you seem to be human and not pornspam. This is a new policy, as of the beginning of 2009 – until then, I only friended folks I knew at least tangentially.
If you friend me on Facebook so that you can then slag off on IF immediately after I accept your friend request, I will de-friend you and daydream about writing cursewords on your forehead with a sharpie. IF is very simple – we post a topic once a week and you draw a picture about that topic if you want. If you don’t want, we don’t need to hear your lameass opinions about it. And by “we” I mean me.
If you friend me and immediately start trying to recruit me for Jesus or tell me how the gays are tearing holes in our social fabric, I will unfriend you and block you from my email. You might notice that I don’t often offer opinions online. This makes me pretty boring to read but has the effect of disguising what is a rather notorious hot temper (on my part). I’ve gone off half-cocked on the internet enough times to know that it is completely not worth it, and much simpler to pretend you don’t exist.
If you friend me and your feed consists entirely of self-promotion, I may hide you from my status feed because I get tired of people selling me things all day. Unless I like your work, in which case I won’t.
If we’re related and you do any of the above, I will politely hide you from my status feeds but not unfriend you because I’m mostly just happy you’re around and that we have this amazing thing called the Internet making it possible for us to disagree.
I don’t always check Twitter. I don’t always check Facebook. I never check MySpace. I have these accounts so I can explain to our clients how to use them (and so I can make fake farms and grow fake things in FarmVille and CountryLife, there, I said it). If you posted important life news and I missed it, you don’t really have the right to be irritated with me about it because you didn’t actually tell me in the first place. Also, I am simply not equipped with the emotional numbness necessary to read 1000+ people a day bitching about movies, standing in line, eating lunch and the other numerous things that people bitch about when they have an audience. I’m not really a dumpster for negativity. Sorry.
Email is always the best way to get a hold of me. It is more reliable than calling me on the phone. Email, email, email. You have my email address. I don’t check GMail every hour, just once a day or so, but my direct lines at Utopian.net and Brianna.org are always being piped straight into my forehead.
No matter how you get a hold of me, you are very important to me. I don’t always respond immediately because sometimes I need to think about my responses. It doesn’t mean I’m ignoring you -quite the opposite. It means I’m thinking a lot about you, and what to say, and how to say it.