By Etan Horowitz | theage.com.au | 27 March
In the early days, the social-networking site Facebook had the feel of an exclusive club. You needed a college e-mail address to join, so for its young users, there wasn't much chance of a parent or boss crashing the party.
Those days are long gone. The site has been open to everyone since 2006, and its fastest-growing demographic is people 25 and older. Members of the corporate world - particularly in the media and information industries - are flocking to the site, deeming it a great networking and communication tool.
As a result, young workers who have been on the site since college are increasingly confronted with a difficult question: What should I do if a boss or co-worker tries to add me as a "friend"?
If they accept the request, they could be giving up more personal information than they would ever share at the office. If they don't accept, the boss might be offended. Besides the professional ramifications, being "poked" (the Facebook equivalent of a friendly nudge) by your boss has the potential to ruin the site in the same way that hearing your dad say "bling" instantly made that word's coolness evaporate.
Perhaps sensing that users are struggling with friend requests from bosses and co-workers, Facebook - which has 69 million active users worldwide - rolled out more privacy controls last week that allow users to group their friends into lists and choose how much information the people on those lists can see.
Social-networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace let users create profiles where they post photos, list their hobbies and interact with other users, who can also post items on their profiles. Besides friends, a Facebook user can see only the profiles of other users in the same "network," which could be based on a school, employer or location. MySpace profiles do not have the same network-based restrictions, but like Facebook, the site does offer privacy controls that let users choose even stricter settings.
Geno Mehalik, 24, a Central Florida hospital employee, said that although he doesn't censor the political views or photos he puts on his Facebook profile, he is careful not to post information that could get him fired.
"I'm unabashedly myself on my Facebook," Mr Mehalik said. "I'm not an idealised, politically correct version of myself."
He just doesn't feel comfortable sharing his whole personality with his boss.
"If you get too buddy-buddy with your superiors, it can screw up the dynamics of the relationship," Mr Mehalik said. "There will always be a gap between who you are at work and who you are at home. But if you have your boss on Facebook, you are putting it all out there."
Mr Mehalik said his boss, who has children his age, is "too professional" to try to add him on a social-networking site. If it did happen, Mr Mehalik said he would tell his boss the request made him uncomfortable.
Others, such as Virginia McComb, 26, have discovered that even if you really are friends with a co-worker, having him or her as a Facebook friend can be problematic. In November, McComb was working at a bank in South Carolina when she secretly got married to a man living in Orlando. She planned to tell co-workers she was married and preparing to move to Florida, but only after another vacant position had been filled.
Because most of her Facebook friends knew about the wedding, she didn't think twice about changing her "relationship status" from "engaged" to "married" on her online profile.
"Then one day I logged onto Facebook and it said, 'So-and-so wants to be your friend,"' Mr McComb said. "And I was like, 'Oh, no, she works with me,' and I knew that if she would have seen that I was married, she would have gone back to work and told everybody. So I changed my status back to engaged, and then I accepted the friend request."
Mr McComb was able to keep the secret, and when she finally told her co-workers, they laughed and wished her well.
Because Facebook, MySpace and other social-networking sites are so new, there isn't universally agreed-upon etiquette. One thing many people agree on: It's OK to accept a friend request from a subordinate, but it's not OK to send one to a subordinate.
"That's an intrusion into their lives," said Fred Stutzman, 29, a doctoral student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who teaches a class on online social networks. "It's like the boss inviting themselves to their subordinate's party."
To avoid issues with co-workers, others suggested using Facebook's privacy controls to limit information or only connecting with colleagues and bosses on more-professional networking sites such as LinkedIn.
As an "older" Facebook user, Eric Longstaff, 38, has been on both sides of the issue. He's a sales manager at an Orlando retail store and imagines that his younger subordinates and co-workers are probably shocked if they find his profile. Yet when he recently discovered the profile of his younger boss, who has worked at the company longer, he freaked out and hoped she wouldn't find his profile.
"I thought that maybe she might think a little less of me for some reason," Longstaff said. "Which is weird because we have a very open environment, and there isn't anything on there that I'm ashamed of."
Longstaff said that as he gets to know his boss better, he might feel more comfortable making her his friend. And although he has accepted friend requests from younger people he supervised at a previous job, he sometimes wonders whether that was the right move.
"There are people who are in college that want to be your friend," Longstaff said. "And I'm thinking, 'I'm fricking old. I don't want a 20-year-old who can't drink to be my friend on Facebook.' But you don't want to (upset them) because you are their boss, and you want them to feel comfortable coming to talk to you."
There are some good things that can happen if the boss can see your Facebook profile. A few weeks ago, Mr Mehalik's boss had some extra tickets to an event that he knew Mr Mehalik wanted to attend. But he had misplaced his mobile phone number. So he got it from the one place he thought he could find it in a pinch: Mr Mehalik's Facebook profile.
MCT
