Recently, I had someone contact me on Facebook, requesting to be my friend. I haven't seen or spoken to this person in a number of years, and quite frankly, I have no real desire to get back in touch. I also had a former colleague recently get in touch with me and also ask to befriend me on Facebook for professional reasons. Let's just get something straight right off the bat. I do not utilize facebook for professional purposes. If you're anything like me (or the countless thousands of other people who use Facebook for personal reasons), then you should know that it is not advisable to mix business with your personal life.



After having spent countless hours on Myspace in the past, I eventually found myself searching through profiles of people who I hardly talked to back in high school but who I was now feverishly looking through their profiles for any updated information and/or pictures. It was ridiculous. After having a serious discussion with my boyfriend about how much time I was wasting, I woke up one day and simply deleted my Myspace page. It was as simple as that. I re-joined Facebook, and started over, only accepting and/or asking for friend requests from people I actually knew and was in regular contact with. Now, instead of having over 100 people on my friends list, half of which I don't even talk to and never really did, I instead have somewhere around 50 people who I regularly converse with. Out of those people, I make it a point to make sure that none of them are people whom I currently work with.

Too many times, people make the mistake of befriending co-workers on social networking sites such as Facebook, Myspace, and Friendfeed, etc. On Twitter, it's a slightly different story. You can't really control who follows your updates on Twitter unless, of course, you block them. However, even that isn't fool-proof because whether or not you're aware of it, people can still be reading through your updates without ever having to follow you or become a member of Twitter. Scary, right?

In any case, many of us have nothing to feel guilty about and wouldn't have a problem adding a boss or co-worker to our personal social networking spaces. But the truth of the matter is that when you do this, you are violating or crossing the line between supervisor and employee. It is difficult to maintain a personal relationship with someone who is cutting you your paycheck every other week. Nothing screams 'creepy' than having your boss sifting through pictures of you riding your bike when you were a kid or celebrating a friend's wedding. That is stuff that is best left for you, your friends and your family to oogle over. The only thing your boss should have access to is information pertaining to what work-related work you're doing for him or her and that's it. So, the next time you feel as if you may want to add your boss to your Facebook profile, just think twice about it, that's all...