Make Friends with Sushi

My brother recently joined Facebook and tried to add one of my friends to his network. My friend didn’t want to befriend my brother if it wasn’t okay with me, but she also didn’t want to offend him by not accepting the invitation. Trouble is, Facebook doesn’t have a “let them down easy” option when rejecting a friend request.

This is a new wrinkle that I’ve noticed lately. Whenever a friend request is rejected, the person tries to reach out through other parties to make certain that the first party isn’t upset. In another case, a friend’s mother tried to befriend her friends through Facebook. None of us wanted to offend her mom by rejecting the request, so we all reached out to her to smooth the way.

This tells me that Facebook needs to adjust it’s friend process to allow people to reject requests be in a gentler way. I need to think a little more about how it might be done, but there are niceties that people want to observe & they’re finding ways outside of the Facebook process to make it happen. Thoughts?