By this stage, everyone in the known universe has already blogged about the etiquette of social networking, to the point where I feel almost too bored by the subject to write about it. Usually, you see, when it comes to questions of MySpace or Facebook manners, I have a ready answer.

“Someone wants to add me but I don’t know them, how do I politely decline their offer of friendship?” Press the Deny button - you don’t know them, you don’t have to be friends with everyone, don’t feel bad.

“My friend’s ex wants to friend me on Facebook, but I think my friend would be upset, what should I do?” Decline. Who needs the stress, for the sake of increasing your friend count by one?

“I’ve got loads of people on my friends list that I don’t really know and don’t want them to know what I’m doing any more…” Yeah, delete them, chances are they won’t even notice. Plus, the label of “friend” on MySpace and Facebook doesn’t mean quite the same thing as it does in real life - it’s much easier to break off a friendship online, because it doesn’t involve having to actually see the person or do anything other than click a button. Problem solved.

Yeah, only today I received a friend request from someone I actively dislike. The feeling’s mutual, too. So obviously I’m not going to click the ‘add friend’ button; I don’t want to be friends! But for some reason I don’t even feel like I want to click the ‘deny’ button, either, because I just want to ignore it and hope it’ll go away. But it won’t. The status update is there every time I log in, big and glaring and demanding I take action.

This is stupid. Denied.

Gulp.