Facebook - How to Decline offers without offense
Facebook has quickly become one of the top Internet sites in the world. In joining this web 2.0 resource last year, I can see why this highly social environment has grown quickly. As we interact with our contacts, it is important to ensure that privacy and safety always come first.
My use of Facebook is more from a professional standpoint than social interactions currently. I often ignore some of the special invitations to click on items from existing friends (e.g., Farmville and other special themes). I always refuse invitations from individuals I don't know, (especially if unusual names appear that could be generated from a worm).
The key concern is security related. Brand new Koobface attacks or malicious URLs can directly infect vulnerable PCs. My true friends also know that I'm security conscious - even if I don't click on that beating heart or rescue the Farmville baby ducks from danger :)
Facebook - How to Decline offers without offense
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE61L1WL20100222
QUOTE: "Can I be your friend?" might work as an ice-breaker among small children, but it's not a question you hear often between adults, at least not outside of Las Vegas. Friendship, it is generally understood, is a relationship that evolves through shared interests, common experiences and a primeval need to share your neighbor's power tools.
Yet for many people, Facebook permits a return to the simplicity of the schoolyard. Rather than inviting someone to be our Facebook friend only after we've become friends in the real world, many of us are using Facebook as a short-cut around all that time-consuming relationship building.
Why bother asking someone you've just met questions about their family, interests and ability to run a farm or aquarium, when you can simply send them a friend request and read the answers in your Facebook news feed? And so we think little of receiving friend requests after we meet someone for the first time at, say, a dinner party.
"Or you can say, Thanks for asking me. I'm keeping Facebook for my family and friends. I'm asking you to join me on my professional network instead.'" Pachter said that whatever you do, it's important not to offend your colleague -- and that's not just because politeness is good etiquette.