How in the world did you become friends with “Hung So Low” on Facebook? Well, I’ll tell you – it was actually very easy. It was “Clyde Sdale’s” fault.
Hey, if your Starbucks doesn’t carry the Onion anymore and you go to bed before The Daily Show, Facebook might be just about all ya’ have left for a good laugh.
The Friend of My Friend is a Horse
Maybe you think you’ve done a pretty darn good job of connecting on Facebook to only those you know, like, respect and admire – and then, of course, your relatives, too.
But, just like in real life, lots of people could care less who they are hooking up with. For instance, why would anyone become friends with Clyde Sdale?
Wouldn’t they look first? And what would they find? It would seem he doesn’t exist. He’s not on LinkedIn (imagine that). ZoomInfo has no record of him (hard to believe, huh?). And, he’s absent from Google (yup).
Clyde claims he’s running an eleemosynary outfit that is actually trying to raise money for good causes, but it’s difficult to be sure. And, if so, most of us would say where’s his Facebook “Like Page”?
Note: If you take a long, long time to investigate his website (don’t ask us how we know), you will find that he’s really someone else (sorry, you’ll just have to figure that out for yourself, because it’s no fun to tell you here. We will ask him to comment, though).
When Clyde wanted to connect to me, I wrote to a bunch of his friends and they had no idea who Clyde Sdale was. And, most of them didn’t really much care. You see, they have thousands of “friends” and they just automatically approve anyone who asks.
That’s certainly warm and fuzzy, but just not very smart.
Friends Who are Hung on You
Why? Well, to stay in the spirit of things, let’s use Hung So Low as a rather tame example. He is a friend of Clyde’s. But, want to bet he’s never contributed to Clyde’s fundraising efforts?
And, yeah, you guessed it again, Hung also cannot be found on…..
But, if Hung can so easily become a friend of your friend (Clyde, like many others, has little discretion), then so can the bad guys. And yes, Virginia, there are bad guys. And, some of them are very bad indeed, as we have pointed out in stories like Scare the Facebook Out of You.
It’s enough to send you right to your Facebook privacy settings and un-click those boxes that say “Allow Friends of Friends.” And, it’s certainly enough to make you wonder how many “Friends of Friends” your daughter allows.
And, finally, I guess it’s might even be enough to make you wonder about those folks with jillions of “friends” on Facebook. What we found out is that folks like that just don’t care. But you might want to.
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