Facebook's squirmy chapter
Site's evolution blurs line between boss and employee
Ali Riaz has 126 friends on his facebook.com account. Ten of them are his employees.
Riaz doesn't mind befriending his staff members online - as long as they initiate the process. "I don't want to impose," said Riaz, chief executive officer of Attivio, a Newton software company. "Everyone has a different definition of what is personal and private. There is a line there, but it's a wiggly line. Whenever you are in a power position, you have to be careful."
Networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook introduce people to new friends and expand their cybercircle of pals. But they're also introducing people to a sticky etiquette issue that is becoming more common: What if your boss wants to be your buddy?
That can be an awkward intersection for people who try to keep their personal space and their workplace separate. But as professional and personal worlds increasingly collide online, it's becoming harder to escape the boss's reach after hours.
The issue has sparked debate among bloggers and online denizens. Should you accept your boss's invitation to online friendship, which would allow him or her to see your roster of acquaintances, party photos, videos, and social activities? Do you dare reject the token of virtual friendship and possibly commit career suicide? Or should you, as one blogger suggests: "Deny, deny, deny. Pretend as if you never saw the friend request."
Before Facebook, these issues often surfaced when a boss invited a subordinate for dinner or a professor looked to socialize with students outside school. But Facebook's growing popularity - 70 million users - has made the encounters more frequent.
And a face-to-face invitation from a superior might be harder to reject than an informal one online.
As the site has evolved from an exclusive online college community to a general public cyber happy hour, it has also attracted the corporate and academic worlds.
Sue Murphy, a manager with the National Human Resources Association trade group in Nashua, has heard fellow professionals and college students fret about whether to allow an employer to join their social sites. Her advice: Create two online pages - one for socializing, the other for professional purposes.
"Once you start to incorporate somebody that you are working for into a social, off-the-clock activity, you start to blur the lines of the relationship," Murphy said. "If you are someone who likes to go to a lot of parties and you have pictures of yourself hanging upside down with a keg, the average person will form an impression of you as that individual. You never get a second chance to make a good first impression."
Facebook began in 2004 as a social site for students at Harvard University and soon expanded to other universities. Akin to an online campus, Facebook provided its early users a place to connect with classmates by adding friends to their networks. When Facebook members add a friend to their list, the link allows that person to see their interests, photos, dating preferences, and friends. As its popularity grew, Facebook began admitting high school students. By 2006, Facebook opened its cyberdoors to all. The result: The site's original core demographic began seeing parents and bosses on Facebook. The site's fastest-growing segment is people age 25 and older, and more than half of its total users are outside college.
Protests erupted in the past year among Facebook members who complained that the site's privacy-control settings weren't strong enough to hide personal details and online activities. Last month, the company introduced new privacy options. Users can now distinguish who can view their personal details by classifying people into specific groups such as friends, co-workers, classmates, or relatives, each category granting a different level of access. In other words, Facebook members can allow their close friends to see their vacation snapshots but restrict co-workers or relatives from the same access.
Yet the friend requests continue to roll in, and not just from employers. They are professors, parents, even publicists trying to butter up journalists and potential clients.
Ivan Sever, a professor at Berklee College of Music, sees the issue from the other perspective: He befriends his students only when they ask.
"I wait," said Sever, who uses his online page primarily to keep in touch with his 20-year-old son in Europe. At work, Sever prefers that his students seek him out as a friend. He offers this analogy: "If I waved to the kids on the bus first, they would think I'm a pervert. But if they wave to me first, then it's OK for me to wave back. . . . If I request the friendship, many students may feel they should accept even if they don't want to. I don't want to make them feel uncomfortable or, worse, make them feel I was stalking them."
Paul F. Levy, president and chief executive officer of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, has 443 friends in a social group he created on his Facebook account. Most of them are his employees. "It's fun, a nice way to communicate with a group of people who might not otherwise interact with me," Levy said.
Would he feel rejected if someone who reports to him didn't accept his friend request? "Not only would there be no hard feelings on my part," he said, "but I am extremely unlikely to even remember who did not respond."
Johnny Diaz can be reached at jodiaz@globe.com. 