A tech-related post this time - there's no vehicular content here. What started out as an idle 'I wish they would do that' thought developed into a realisation that Facebook may be missing out on a vast untapped stream of data, which given their insatiable appetite for knowing everything about everyone surprises me.
What happens when a friend request is rejected or declined? In short, nothing - the requester is not notified and the request is even removed from their activity log leaving no evidence that it ever happened, which inevitably causes confusion as they think maybe they didn't send the request after all and send it again so the other person gets annoyed by having to reject it again. Anyway, that's not really my point. I don't know about others but I only send friend requests to people I have actually met and I think have a high likelihood of accepting. The majority do but on the odd occasions when someone decides not to I would quite like to receive some feedback on why they did so - is it because they don't like the content of my profile, they just don't feel they know me well enough, or something else? If I don't know what's wrong, there's nothing I can do that might make them more likely to accept, but it feels quite rude messaging someone who has just rejected my friend request asking why they did it.
Having thought about this from a purely personal point of view, I then realised that collecting this information would surely give Facebook themselves a massively valuable insight into the psychology of their users and the type of people they might want to be friends with. As a simple example, let's say person X tends to reject requests from users with certain characteristics because he doesn't like the content of their timelines, but accepts requests from users with other characteristics. Knowing this would allow Facebook to provide much better focusing in person X's 'people you may know' list with a consequently greater chance that he will become friends with them and Facebook can do their 'your friends like this so you might too' marketing wizardry. Maybe they could even use this information to help build up statistical data on the probability of any given friend request being rejected and the likely reason why!
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't something like this exist a few years ago? After declining a friend request I'm sure you had to select an option, which I think may have been along the lines of 'do you know this person?' and selecting 'no' may have had certain consequences for the requester. Like so many Facebook features, this quietly disappeared just as suddenly as it appeared with no explanation, but expanding it into a list of reasons for declining would have provided useful feedback, both for the requester and more importantly for Facebook themselves.
Any thoughts, or is it just me who wants to know why my friend requests get rejected?
No comments:
Post a Comment