Accepting Friend Requests
Sometimes potential friends find you before you find them. When this happens, they send you a friend request, which you can then accept or decline. You might receive a friend request via email, or you can view friend requests within Facebook.
Here’s how it all works:
- To view pending friend requests, click the Friend Requests icon in the Facebook toolbar, as shown in Figure 4.7.
Figure 4.7. Viewing pending friend requests.
- To view the Profile of a person requesting to be your friend, click his name.
- To accept this friend request, click the Confirm button.
- To refuse this request, click the Not Now button.
If you accept this person’s request, he’ll receive a notification as such. If you reject the request, the person will not be notified. This protects against negative reactions if you decide not to do the friend thing.
And here’s the deal. You don’t have to accept a friend request, even if you know that person in the real world. Remember, after you’ve accepted a friend request, that person can view all your personal information and status updates. (That is, unless you alter your privacy settings to hide information from that person, as I discuss in Chapter 15, “Keeping Some Things Private: Managing Facebook’s Privacy Settings.”) You might not want to accept all the friend requests you receive; that’s your prerogative.