A Facebook Request

I beg of you, please do not send private Facebook messages to enormous groups of friends. I am getting more and more of these. I have to say, it's pretty annoying to get constant notifications every time another of the 55 recipients replies to the person who sent it. Unlike statuses and other posts which you can easily "unfollow," you have to formally "leave the conversation" to get out of the notification nightmare for messages, and Facebook posts a note to all the recipients that you have left. Most of us have clicked "leave the conversation" and then didn't, because it warned that it would make a big announcement about it. Now we are all cringing every two minutes when another notification pops up.

(In case you're wondering, the prevailing etiquette seems to be to reply to the message and then immediately get the heck out of the conversation... guilt-free!)

Instead, post a status or note that is only visible to those people. That way if we don't need to reply, we don't have to, and if we do reply, we can turn the notifications off if we want to.

If it's something that requires ongoing communication, start a private "group" for that purpose. Although... I've been added to groups I didn't care to join as well. Awkward. I don't feel comfortable leaving those either, but at least I can turn off the notifications.

Instead of just adding you to groups automatically, Facebook should send you an invitation to join, saying, "Mary invited you to join the group South Austin Pole Dancers." Then you can choose to join or not. Instead it's, "Mary added you to the group South Austin Pole Dancers." And you are a member. Yay. Oh, and it goes to all your friends' newsfeeds, too. "Kathy was added to South Austin Pole Dancers by Mary." Thanks, Mare.

And if my FB buddies are getting any funny ideas about adding me to questionable groups now, just remember... paybacks are hell.

:D

To those who have read this far through my stream of consciousness this morning, I offer a very helpful Facebook search hint! One giant flaw with Facebook search is that there is no way to search for business pages by location. The information is all right there, but you cannot access it in search. It took me forever to figure this one out on my own, because Google didn't have an answer. But actually... Google was the answer.

If you have the awesome and powerful Googlebar Lite installed on Firefox, just go to Facebook and do a site search in Googlebar for something like "restaurant austin tx" and BOOM. There they are in a pretty list!

If you are using IE (bless your heart) or don't have or want Googlebar Lite, just go to Google and type:

site:www.facebook.com plus your keywords, like...

site:www.facebook.com restaurants austin tx

Ta daaaah!