Facebook is Having Weird Flukes with Notifications, Poke Privacy Today

I logged into Facebook this morning to the usual flurry of messages, notifications, pokes and friend requests. As I was responding to each point of contact, I noticed a couple of distinctly weird new behaviors.

First, in my notifications, I was told that someone by the name of Derek had joined Facebook and that I should friend him.

I have no idea who this Derek character is, so it came as a surprise to me that Facebook would want me to friend him. I assume this is part of Facebook’s new friend recommendation feature.

The feature is cool in theory, but it needs to be dialed down in its intrusiveness in practice. I really don’t want to get pinged with new potential friends. I want to go through the list of recommended friends at my leisure and decide who I might want to connect with the way Linkedin does it.

If this is indeed part of the new feature, then it’s really news to me. Facebook shouldn’t just unilaterally launch features that fundamentally change user interactions with the site, say by notifying them about something they’re not used to getting notified by, without discussing it with the user base first.

Obviously, this isn’t as big a deal as the News Feed or Beacon being unilaterally thrust upon users, but at this point — given all the information that comes flying at my head every time I log into FB — it’s just as annoying.

After screen-shotting the offending friend notification, I went about dealing with the rest of my inputs. When I got to the pokes, I noticed that a strange man — someone I do not know and am not friends with on the site — had poked me. This is odd because, as you can clearly see below, I have disabled the function that lets non-friends poke me.

I don’t know how this fool was able to poke me, but I don’t like it. It doesn’t matter how young and hip you are, a random uninvited poke from a guy you don’t know is just plain creepy.

Update: Apparently, despite having my privacy settings tuned to disallow poking in search results, the poke option is still showing up in my search listing. My friend and colleague Ellen Petry Leanse was kind enough to send me these screenshots of how my search listing looks:

and how it should look:

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