I'm on Facebook because everyone's on Facebook and I have actually used it to make contact with a lot of interesting people including old friends I hadn't seen in decades.
But I really don't like Facebook's public message function because once you join multiple groups, you never seem to see all the messages and never in the right order. Every so often lately, I see a public message where someone is asking me to respond to something…and then I realize the message is nine months old. Even though I'm on Facebook several times a day, I never saw it before.
And I don't like its private message function because it's awkward to compose messages online, there's no real way to compose them offline and it's awkward to save anything for posterity or later reference. Folks, if you want to write to me, do it via e-mail…please.
And I just discovered something I really don't like. If you're unaware of it, you won't like it either.
On Facebook, you can write and send a message to anyone. If you're on their Friends list, your message goes into little folder we all have there called Messages and they're notified they have a message waiting. If you're not on their Friends list, your message goes into a folder called Message Requests. It's accessible as a sub-folder of your Messages folder. Or if you're using the Messenger app on your smartphone, go to Settings, then select People, then select Message Requests.
I just did this and in that folder, which I hadn't known about 'til now, I found private messages that people had sent me but which I'd never seen. There were hundreds in there.
I don't even know how many. I scrolled through about 500 sent in the last fifteen or so months and that wasn't all of them. About 300 were Spam of some form — a lot of strangers who look suspiciously like phony names even when there's a photo attached. But these people — especially the women who seem interested in having sex with me — have no history, no public postings, no nothing.
Another hundred or so were apparently real people — strangers to me who wanted to say hi, get onto my Friends list, tell me they like something I've done, ask a question, etc. I feel bad that none of them ever heard back from me.
And another hundred were real people I would really like to have responded to…and will. I'll try and get to the previous group, too. There were old acquaintances wanting to reach me…people I met at conventions who wanted to ask something or continue a conversation…even a relative I've never met.
Since they weren't on my Friends list, Facebook put their messages in this secondary folder I didn't even know I had. I need to start checking this thing regularly. If you're on Facebook and you didn't know about it, maybe you do, too.