How do you refuse a 'fraanship' request?

What do you do when you find that someone who you are merely 'acquainted' with and who you hardly know, sends you a 'friendship' request on one of those several social networking sites that you are registered in?

Frankly, increasing the number of friends I have in my list does not appeal to my ego as it does ( if you were to believe the newspaper articles) to some youngsters. Further, I do not like to display my profile publicly - that goes for those sites as well which are supposedly there to 'help you network for business reasons' (no frannship mails here).

Surely there is no harm in 'accepting' the invite of an 'acquaintance'. But if it were a social networking site, I may not want to share photos of say a vacation with everyone who is listed as a friend on the site. (One solution is to use some other site and send a link to only those who you think are relevant). Further, there may be personal information that I may not want to share with merely an 'acquaintance' I met at some party. Besides, what do you do, if you had taken an instant dislike to that 'acquaintance' and would certainly not want to be seen as being 'friends' or whatever with him/her?

Getting yourself de-listed (is that the right word???) from the site is not the correct solution. After all, I know more about my friends and relatives these days through these social networking sites than I do from talking to them or e-mailing them. But what can one possibly do about some people who I think are a pain in the ***?

Of the usefulness of campaigns

Save the tiger campaign has drawn flak from some quarters because while it makes people talk about it (with comments like 'oh the cub is chooo sweet/cute'), it does not tell people what they can do to help (monetary contribution to the cause or other kinds of contribution). And I would tend to agree with the conclusion that by simply talking about it and joining the 16-odd facebook groups, how am I really contributing to save the tiger? How many people in those awareness groups have done anything concrete to save at least one tiger?

Saying that talking and voicing concerns will help (even if indirectly help the cause by raising awareness) is like asserting that people who play farmville on facebook are contributing to India's agrarian economy. This is not like an AIDs campaign where creating awareness will lead people to take precautionary measures (like using condoms or using disposable needles). Why doesn't the Save the Tiger ad suggest some concrete measures about what urban masses can do to really save the Tiger? And let those suggestions be practical - not something like - stop using tiger products (I do not know any one in urban areas who uses Tiger skin or eats Tiger meat or uses any part of the Tiger for curing any ailment).

The breast cancer awareness campaign 1 month ago was also on similar lines. Apparently, women had to put the colour of the bra they were wearing on that day on their gtalk/yahoo chat/other chat/facebook status board, to 'raise awareness about breast cancer'.

I felth such a measure was the most useless method (indeed of the highest order). Firstly, how can someone's status message on the bra colour raise awareness about breast cancer? Secondly, it was not an awareness campaign so to say - no handouts or accompanying e-mails which would tell you how you can prevent/reduce the incidence of breast cancer.

When the Internet and e-mail was new to India, there used to be these peculiar chain mails sent for 'helping' a certain cause (justice/appeal for someone) - something similar to a signature campaign, 'please send this to 10 people and add your name to the below list which will be sent to President of India'. And people would (irritatingly) forward those lists. Till date, I do not know of any such spam mail eventually solving the cause for which it was forwarded by scores of people.

I really wish people would stop focusing on such useless methods of raising awareness about an issue and come down to implementing some thing that is practical and aligned to the cause instead.