You think that Lucy wants to be my friend?
Well, if that’s so, I have to say she has a
disturbing way of binning stuff we send -
unless, of course, the entry comes from Bazza.

(Yeak, I know, I'm not supposed to do this. But just this once, Guv ...)

Bob, Facebook does indeed give me a list of "friend suggestions". It also gives a list of "friend requests", which I take to imply that those people have themselves initiated such requests, unless they have somehow been generated by Facebook. I am deeply suspicious of all such sites.

Actually, the question is an academic one, since I have no idea what the point of Facebook is, nor the purpose of "friends", and I only use Facebook to look at the WP site, usually with considerable bafflement as to how it is supposed to work.

Much of the time, facebook is for doing exactly what you are doing here, chatting. No mystery there, Brian.

Nemo

I use Facebook to find out what my children are doing and to communicate with them.

Yes, of course, I get that, Nemo. I should have made it clear that my bafflement is caused by the organization, or rather total lack of it, of the only Facebook site I've encountered. The Eratosphere site, by contrast, is laid out in a series of boards within which there are a number of posts on specific topics, and it is easy to identify the most recent activity or to select topics of particular interest. But the WP Facebook site seems to consist of a single inchoate stream of Joycean proportions, and I haven't found a useful way of navigating it.

I just got a friending request on gmail, supposedly from Jerome Betts, so I was glad that I had read about the phenomenon here. I deleted it after seeing that it was indeed from infoaxe.

Susan

Sorry about that, Susan. I was hoping that Esphere people in my gmail address book would see this thread or the other one I started. Have spent a lot of the day sending out warnings. There's nothing detectable on my computer and I hope it leaves the address book alone after sending one email and doesn't lurk there for ever. Some people have said their junk filters catch it. I have removed about 100 casually acquired addresses in case it does recur. Seems to relate to a search toolbar, though some internet sites say it is also a phishing device. Propagates like a virus, though.

Here's one easy way to detect a scam. If anyone receives an email from me offering to share $135,000,000 with them, it's a fake. But if it simply asks them to send me $135,000,000, then it's genuine.

LinkedIn
 

LinkedIn seems to have a more intrusive policy. Am I the only one who gets LinkedIn requests from people who didn't mean to send them?

I get requests to connect on LinkedIn about once every two months. When, as they usually do, they name actual acquaintances, I write to explain that I don't much do the social media thing and ask them not to take personally that I ignore their requests. More often than not, the reply is that they were just poking around LinkedIn out of curiosity and didn't mean to send anything to me or anyone else about it.

There is an unsubscribe button for those Linked-In things. It doesn't work right away, but if you do it a couple of times, it kicks in. I don't get them anymore.

Nemo