I don’t really know what my Facebook profile evolved into over the years, because I never really decided how I wanted my Facebook profile to serve me. With stockpiling random virtual friendships with people who have rarely been even close to an actual definition of a friend, even an acquaintance, Facebook slowly stopped being my primary social network to stay in touch with friends from close and afar.

I think I took my first step back from Facebook as soon as I noticed that the number of friend requests kept getting exponentially higher due to completely random, unknown people, who most certainly didn’t have friendly intentions or were actually looking to rekindle some long lost friendships. Not that Facebook outgrew that initially very romantic concept a long time ago.

I see Facebook today as a giant global market, where a friend request is like being tapped on the shoulder by people who will most likely try to get your attention for yet another obscure reason. If you’re gullible enough to respond, you’re most often dealing with another invitation to this or that pyramid scheme, being pushed some service you don’t need or, in the worst cases, being the target of offensive proposals. Today, everything is allowed on Facebook.

For some time I still stuck with the notion that Facebook can, at least for me, remain as just a fancy communication tool to keep in touch with my friends and share some funny stuff. Now I have completely abandoned this idea. Part of it was of course the fact, that I never attempted to keep my profile completely private, even though I wanted to be an online channel to the people I know or met – both old friends and people I meet through business travels, events, working for my second business and so forth. I still cherish networking.

However, there’s a funny aspect to networking through Facebook. The more you do it, the more people Facebook wants to connect you with. “Hey, maybe you know Karina, you have 1 friend in common!” That kind of deal. Which can lead to fascinating discoveries if you live on east coast of USA and Facebook somehow digs up your long lost school friend who now lives on the other side of the continent. In Slovenia, however, everybody already knows everybody.

For people who you are not friends with, but have 1 friend in common, there probably is a valid reason why you two aren’t already connected. But since it became common at some point to just send invitations to everyone Facebook suggests, the red number for friend requests just kept growing and growing. I tried accepting connections with people I actually met and wanted to connect with, but it soon became unbearable.  So I stopped confirming people altogether.

That was a mistake. More often than not I got a guilt trip at an event or a party by someone I barely knew, since I got asked why I never accepted their Facebook friend request. What do you answer to that? Uncomfortable feelings followed by apologizing and trying to find a proper explanation. Eventually, to once and for all sidestep this unpleasant conundrum, I decided to just sit down and accept ALL friend requests. We’ll see what happens.

And what happened? I accepted so many lingering friend requests, Facebook apparently thought I desperately want new people in my Facebook network, so I instantly got another hundred people asking to be friends, because I was obviously offered as a suggestion to just about everyone I had at least one friend in common with.

It was clearly time for an alternative plan. I decided to flip my Facebook profile into a different functionality. My profile page now accepts followers, not friends. I keep my friend connections elsewhere, while Facebook grew into a larger community where I hang around for a spontaneous chat, to laugh at random jokes people post, to get informed about a piece of news I might have missed, to grow my business network or to help others get connected for their businesses. New followers also don’t need to be accepted, which is an added bonus. I can now no longer offend anyone with my online absence.

We are all together now. In one place. Connected. If we know each other or not.