Beef About Facebook

After looking at so many worthy stories for my Oops Award of the week, I decided to give it to Facebook. Why? Because of its stupid friend request policy. If you're an avid Facebooker, you probably know the social networking site has made changes to the way you can send friend requests; making it virtually impossible to send a request to someone who doesn't have mutual friends with you. 

This has happened to me a couple times and now Facebook has really upset me. I was trying to send a request to someone who I knew but didn't have mutual friends with. An error message came up and said the request couldn't be sent because I didn't know the person. I reported it and tried a little later. However, this time, it took me through this "checkpoint" thing and now I can't send requests or message anyone for two days!

I understand why Facebook is doing this but I think they've gone a little bit overboard. I haven't had any problems with this in the past as I'm friends with some of the UNC baseball/basketball players, among others. I sent a request to them (even though we had no mutual friends) and nothing happened.

This really makes me mad because I'm not one of those spammers or "annoying" people Facebook is targeting with these policy changes. I'm simply trying to friend someone, that's all. Plus, reporting the error to Facebook isn't really useful because they may never see your report and/or you have to wait a good while for the tech team to fix the problem. It's funny: Facebook's bio on their Twitter page says "Giving people the power to share and make the world more open and connected." How can we if our accounts get blocked by simply friending people?