What Happened To "Skip This Step"?

It used to be that when I accepted a friend request in Facebook, I'd get a choice of about a dozen ways I know somebody. I never once filled it out. I always clicked on "skip this step" and moved on.

Recently (in the past couple days?), that screen changed in my Facebook account and I can't "skip this step" anymore. Now the choices are "request confirmation" or "cancel" (see below).

Did I do something accidental or did this change in everyone's accounts? If so, why?

UPDATE: Based on the comments I am getting, it's not me. This is truly annoying. I get a lot of friend requests. Adding several more steps to the confirm is a pain in the rear. This combined with the facebook spam that's taking over my email inbox is getting me damn close to leaving the service entirely. Maybe LinkedIn is the adult Facebook after all.

Comments

[Sylvain Carle]

Just noticed the same thing... I guess the "social graph" premium was worth too much to let users have "weak" ties.

[Tom]

Yep, I found the same thing and began wondering about it. Guess we all need to be even more connected by a demographic community.

[Daryll Strauss]

I joined a week ago to try it out and that was the way my friends were signed up.

I'm sure it's useful information for them and allows them to more easily increase people's connections.

[Alex Iskold]

I could not agree with you more. This is annoying as the updates about things I could not care less.

LinkedIn on the other hand is a great tool that I use almost daily. I wish they fixed a few things, but overall it is by far more useful than Facebook.

Alex

[Dave!]

I noticed it, too. But I also noticed that if you don't check anything and just hit "Request Confirmation" it seems to work just fine.

[tobias]

Sylvain nails it - they need to make sure the social graph is value-optimized (to them, advertisers and users) - and in the explicit web model, what you take out is a function of what you put in (or what you force your users to put in).

Roll on the attention-based implicit web...

[Hinch]

It's a tad frustrating to force users to select an option when the options don't cover all scenarios. I had to say i know my wife because she's in my family. It would be better if i could select spouse, or skip the option altogether. Now people think we're brother and sister :)

[Robert Dewey]

I'm new to Facebook, and I've turned off all e-mail notifications. I only have ~12 friends, and the amount of e-mail I was getting was insane. It seems like every little update a friend makes is streamed to me via e-mail.

I agree that the "how you know this person" is a bit of a pain, especially if you're dealing with a high volume.

[Rex Hammock]

I just ran this past my in-house Facebook focus group of high school/university student users. Instant analysis: It's not just adult users who won't like this de-featuring of "skip this step."

[Darren Herman]

I just saw this on Facebook as well. I can see the value it brings, but I'm not a fan of it from the user experience.

[simon]

at least with myspace i didnt know half the clowns requesting adds, but with facebook it puts me in contact with a whole heap of clowns i once knew and would rather forget ...

im about >_< that close to leaving as well..

frustrating

[Patrick Ruffini]

This is annoying. Of my nearly 300 friends, maybe a dozen or so have gone through the step of Requesting Confirmation of me, or I of them. Whatever the usefulness of this information, users are voting against providing it overwhelmingly with their mouse clicks.

Instead of actually improving the user experience, Facebook is now forcing me to use it. That's just bad form.

Suggestion: make this an action people take when their loitering around checking for live feed updates or waiting for more requests to come in. Call it Categorize Your Connections. Arguably, this information is more useful than listing friends by Networks, so this is an option people can use for how to display their friends or for managing what information to show to what people. With hundreds of friends, it becomes a bear to exercise the minute control over profile access that Facebook advertises, but with 5 or 6 predefined user groups to start from (blog readers, professional contacts, college friends, etc.), it's a snap.

I also wonder if this isn't Facebook frowning upon the practice of popular bloggers like Scoble in effect maintaining a directory of their readership by approving all friend requests. It's understandable of them to try and resist the creeping MySpaceization of their network but at the same time it's a heavy handed tactic (particularly for semi-public figures who "know" lots of people through their blogs) that shows they don't trust their users to manage their relationships.

[proales]

Does LinkedIn even qualify as a social network anymore? I think Facebook has upped the bar for feature sets necissary to be considered more then a slashdot-ish like forum..

[Brad Feld]

Turn off all email notifications. Only check Facebook once a day. Your life will improve.

[Blake Ross]

This is a bug that will be fixed shortly.

[Ari]

This is a bug which will be fixed soon. Workaround until then: click "cancel" and it will actually finish the confirmation (though it won't appear to until you reload the page). It came up when the page was switched over to being more ajax-y.

[Ari]

by the way, speaking of bugs, fred, looks like your page displays the email address of the person commenting despite the assurance "(Not displayed with comment.)" (which I guess only shows up on the error page, when you initially leave off a field)

i guess we're even :P

[Sam Purtill]

Fred, I think this is kind of annoying, but the point of it is so that you are only adding people that you know or have actually met in real life. They do give you the "Facebook Friends" option for people you meet online, but Facebook wants to mirror "social reality" so it doesn't turn into MySpace where you have 6,000 friends, of which you only know 10 of them.

As far as email notifications, I turned every single notification off in my account settings three weeks ago. I just get notifications when I sign in on the home page now.

[Ivan Pope]

I saw this and thought I was going mad ...
Ari from Facebook says it's a bug. I say nonsense - it may be a kite flying exercise, 'Let's force them to choose how they met someone and see how it flys'. I don't believe it can be a bug at this level of operating.
Personally, I think it's a terrible move - and made even worse by the fact that they haven't upgraded the options available to take them beyond the student view of the world.

[ashkan karbasfrooshan]

Ultimately, Facebook is the Database of Connections, as such, it has an incentive to know that it knows the nature of the relationship between two profiles.

If it can differentiate relationships between a) family members, business acquaintances and classmates, it can suck out the value of Geni, LinkedIn and Classmates.com.

It's really a matter of time before Facebook does a big push to get its users to clarify who's who. Otherwise Facebook is worth a lot less...

http://www.watchmojo.com/web/blog/?p=1886

[Ivan Pope]

'Skip this Step' is back ...

[Jason White]

Not surprising that they reverted once users were seen to be rejecting the new modification. Given the amount of questionable design decisions that facebook has made (http://www.opinsource.com/opinsource/2007/07/facebook-ui-tea.html)
lack of bugs seen on the site in recent times, and propensity to try out new, potentially controversial features (i.e. when the News Feed was originally introduced), it would seem Sam Purtill's description of this as a "Kite-flying exercise" is inescapable.

Aside from my reservations about this decision (and my subsequent happiness to see things return to the way they were) I recently published a lengthy piece about certain of FB's other interface/design decisions at opinsource (www.opinsource.com)

[Dan Tiernan]

I finally setup a facebook account to check it out, after reading so much from Fred, Josh K and Pmarca. I am hoping that I can control the email flow (as described in other comments) because the platform potential is so fascinating. Out of my 1,500+ email contacts in outlook, Facebook only found about 20 Facebook accounts, of which only 10-15 were close enough relationships for me to add as a friend. These are still two different worlds. I am a native in the linked-in world (300+ real connections)and I am clearly an alien in Facebook. more thoughts here . .
http://dantiernan.com/blog/2007/07/21/facebook-platform-is-so-cool-no-wonder-linked-in-is-reacting/

[GV]

If you haven't already try updating to the newest version of Firefox (or BonEcho if you're on the mac build) and that *should* do the trick.