Welcome To Headup – The semantic web – Blog

The wildcard friend request conundrum

Facebook friend requests come in all shapes and sizes, anything from a flirtatious “Hey Gorgeous” to a blast from your kindergarten past. As online friendship becomes more socially acceptable, so do friend requests from people you’ve never met or even heard of. Wildcard Facebook friend requests represent a social conundrum and raise a prickly issue: Is there a polite way to ask someone:
“Excuse me but WHO THE !@#$ ARE YOU?”

Who the !@#$ are you Takeru Kobayashi?!?

I’m personally facing this very issue with the aforementioned Mr. Takeru Kobayashi, who has requested my Facebook friendship and whom, to the best of my knowledge, I’ve never met or heard of before. Fortunately for me Headup can assist me to avoid this potential netiquette disaster.

Headup – more omniscient* than Deep Thought, cooler than HAL

Headup’s unique ability to identify people and collect their profiles from a range of social services makes it an ideal tool for snooping out friendship candidates, flirtatious paramours, and self proclaimed potty pals, prior to approving them as your Facebook friends.

Stalking, snooping and spying – the Headup way

Headup will often be able to show you some photos of the flirt along with some of your common friends, tell you a bit about what your former kindergarten confederate is up to, and reveal that Takeru Kobayashi, AKA “The Tsunami”, is an illustrious member of the most prestigious of clubs: former winners of Nathan’s Famous International Hot Dog Eating Competition.

Armed with this smorgasbord of information I can now make an informed choice on whether to welcome Takeru into my circle of friends, or leave him out in the cold and watch the videos Headup provides of his hotdog eating antics instead.

Takeru "The Tsunami" Kobayashi doing his thing

This ability to check out potential friends beforehand makes Headup a powerful boost to your Facebook activities, enabling you to filter out identity thieves, serial ‘befrienders‘ and other social hazards.

How you can get this:

If you don’t have it yet, download the Headup plug-in for Firefox and follow the instructions, make sure you connect the addon to your Facebook account (at least).

If you already have Headup, make sure you’re logged into your Facebook account and click the little Headup icon on your browser’s status bar (bottom right hand corner of the window).

Headup settings - bottom right of your browser

This will bring you to the personalization screen

Connect Headup to your Facebook account

Make sure that when you’re popped over to the Facebook authorization window you agree to give access to Headup.

Click the Finish button.

Finish connecting Headup to your services to save your settings

That’s it, you’re done!

Next time you visit Facebook peoples’ names will be underlined with Headup’s signature orange dashed line and hovering over them will prompt Headup to provide you with whatever details it is able to retrieve for them.

Let me know if you come up with something juicier than a hotdog…

—

Enjoyed this post?
You might like  “Yo Tweeps! Check Headup on Twitter…” too.
It explains how to use Headup to boost your Tweeting…

*  Thought about this after writing the post:
By definition it’s impossible to be “more omniscient”