I don't know about knowing the people who say they DK (don't know) me

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2008/01/03 10:01 -05:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2008/01/03/6965695.aspx


I have been mildly passive in LinkedIn and facebook, up to now.

Basically, if someone invites me to become a part of their network or whatever, and I know them, then I

Now my definition of "worked with" is pretty liberal, since a whole bunch of my work connections boil down to email conversations of issues, most often when people find me rather than me finding them. I guess I figure after 3-4 issues or maybe less if it was something really complex with a bunch of emails.

But recently this backfired, when somebody on another person's list who I added DK'ed me (anyone else remember that one from Oliver Stone's Wall Street?), marked the invite as Doesn't Know and left it at that....

It prompted me look in my email archives --- 4 different issues, 23 different emails between the two of us across those four issues, all related to various internationalization issues and the most recent about six months ago. So it did fit within my "liberal" definitions.

Perhaps my definition is not really passive enough, or maybe it is too liberal. Maybe I need to up the count of mails or the count of issues or limit it to people who I meet in person or have discussed the idea of meeting them in person at some point. It somehow bothers me to be DK'ed by anyone who I would invite -- since it means that others who I respect have much stricter definitions than I).

I guess it does not matter too much -- I log in to facebook every few days and LinkedIn maybe once or twice every few weeks, so they hardly are keeping me glued to my browser looking for new contacts. But passive social networking when you find out you aren't as passive as others is kind of a drag. :-(

 

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# Blake Handler on 3 Jan 2008 10:14 AM:

Michael -

“Friends” are no longer just defined as “one-to-one” connections – be rather the philosophy of the “six degrees of separation”  (^_^)

Blake Handler

Microsoft MVP

# Raymond Chen - MSFT on 3 Jan 2008 10:55 AM:

Naturally the reason is that even though the person met your formal prerequisites, the interactions left no lasting impression. Perhaps you should add that to your criteria. (Or Facebook needs to be another option for declining: "Don't remember.")

# Michael S. Kaplan on 3 Jan 2008 11:51 AM:

The trouble here is that there is no way to judge "lasting impression" when people are totally interested in the moment but forget soon after.

Hell, I guess the answer is just not to deal with either of them -- and never add anyone myself (under the "if you don't ask, they can't DK" theory). :-)


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