Why Would Someone On Facebook Ask A Total Stranger If They Could Be Their Friend

[sandyRoe]

?

[Bathsheba]

Chrissa....exactly the same thing happened to me with Twitter! I was out of there like a.....really really fast thing ;)

Baths
x x x

[netibiza]

I only accept requests from people I know.

[netibiza]

On Twitter I feel terribly guilty when people follow me as I'm dead boring and rarely post.

[Hypognosis]

I found this thread just before going to bed and it's grown to 3 pages, plus a Best Answer, by the time the day was done.

I'm still bugged by how it was *technically* achievable for any person, or (sinister?) lurking computer code to find and follow her account in 5 seconds.

@Bathsheba, was "5 seconds" just a figure of speech or do you mean literally?

I signed up on my laptop and vaguely recall a fair old pause after pressing the big button to create my account, before I could even look around to see what the newsfeed page looked like, so 5 seconds would be about as long as it would take to work out where to click before you could start typing.

Until this year (or some time in the last 12 months), you were "discoverable" on Twitter, via other users searching for the email account you used to sign up with. If your real life friends know you're not the kind to run multiple emails, disguised names etc. then they'll not have a hard time guessing which account you signed up to Twitter with. But it would take a real tech-head to write a script to scour Twitter continuously until you signed up with an email they know.

To anyone else, I think you're invisible on Twitter until you make your first Tweet. If you run a search for the phrase "this is my first tweet" or "hello twitter" you might be able to similarly spook someone who signed up seconds ago.

Other than that, there is the problem of the many namesakes we all have. If I search my actual name in Facebook, I have about a dozen.

[Mamyalynne]

I've had friend requests from people who think I am the famous person who shares my name, easy to handle.

I treat Facebook like a magazine, flick through the parts I want to read and ignore what I don't.

[Hypognosis]

@SandyRoe

The Facebook mobile app sends "push notifications" (eg banner alerts, depending on your settings preference) which ask "Do you know Fred Bloggs?"
These are not caused by the named person actively sending you a friend request, it is an irritating programmed 'feature' which seems designed to suggest "people you may know" (the equivalent as seen on your PC). I can only guess that it is based on a "friends of friends" list but it sometimes suggests people from places and countries I see no earthly connection to. They may be people who saw a post in a public conversation you contributed to (eg some News pages' comment section uses your FB ID and your comments, name, avatar, location and occupation are out there, in public).

If you've literally just signed up, have posted zero comments and have 0 friends, any "do you know X?" HAS to have been thrown out by some random selection process.

Genuine friend requests appear on a special page for managing contacts and, if you have to actively delete it, then it was a genuine request. Perhaps someone was searching for you, by name?

[ummmm]

I wonder does Mark still appear as your first friend?