I perform triage on my work Inbox several times a day, even on weekends. I have "read" your "important" message, but not really. I've prioritized it for real review on monday afternoon, after I take care of important issues (as prioritized by me). It's better for me and you if we just pretend this moment never happened.

Being in the dark sounds like a bad thing, but it's not. It's better for my mom to think that I haven't seen the long message she wrote on Facebook. After all: who knows what I'm doing?

In reality, I'm fucking around during this conference on the distraction that is Facebook, I'm touched by her message, but I can't exactly reply until tomorrow.

I was struct by this yesterday for something seemingly completely unrelated.

I've ordered a new laptop. An awesome thing about the company I bought it from is that they show average build times based on recently processed orders on their website, presented me with a flowchart of their build process and time estimates (generic estimates), and displays the current status in their process for my laptop.

Being in the dark would have left me not thinking much about it, as usual.

Sometimes I'm even surprised when I get a delivery because I forgot I ordered something (even if I ordered it the day before, sometimes; I do most my shopping online) because it's a non-event, and I know it'll arrive when it arrives.

For a big item like my new laptop it might cross my mind now and again, but until a week or two from ordering, when they indicated it will likely be ready, I wouldn't think much about it.

But now, because I have access to the information, I check it several times a day to see if there's an update. Can't help myself. I keep wondering how far they've gotten. There's no practical benefit to me at all. And it's creating an expectation that wasn't there before, of something happening soon.

In retrospect, I might even have preferred not having the information.

Hence the addition of the FB "feature" in question. It's not for your benefit, it's for Facebook's benefit by boosting your participation.

Then, umm, don't add them as friends.

Extreme point missing: "ignore now" is different than "ignore always"

Mild point missing: Sometimes it is socially expedient to "not see" a message from someone while you are busy doing other things, even though you read and saw it. Much better than going through explanations of how, "gee, I'm busy, its not that i don't like you, just got other stuff right now, and no matter how important this is to you, my stuff is more important at the moment, ill get to you when i can", as opposed to "oh hey, just saw this, what's up?"

I'm sure you'll advocate for the former method, because of some crazy strict truth thing, and people should be less emotionally sensitive and blah blah, but the fact remains: people can be pretty sensitive. This little white lie makes interactions much smoother and avoids unnecessarily hurt feelings.

In GSM networks _delivery_ reports are a SMS feature. You get a delivery report when the SMS is delivered to the phone.

BBM will tell you if a message was delivered successfully, but it's also capable of telling you if a message was read. The catch of course is that the user can control whether or not they want people to see if they've read the message. Ditto for iMessage.

I'd also add another issue that makes them bothersome - lots of times I read short messages via their incoming notifications which (afaik) doesn't update "read" status. So if I had read receipts on, I'd often appear to have not read something for hours that I actually had.

Not that these issues make read receipts for short messages useless and I suppose it's nice to have them as a feature for groups of people that want/need it for whatever reason, but I think opt-in is the right default for it.

This completely ignores the reality of how people use Facebook, as if one could partition every personal relationship in your life into two homogeneous groups "friends" and "not friends."

Yes, I know you can have friend lists on Facebook, but this feature clearly embraces its uniformity.

The way people interact with other people can not be reduced to a finite set of values, such as "friend or not friend" or "family member, lover, friend, acquaintance, co-worker". In other words, this is not a Facebook vs. G+ dilemma.

The problem here is the fact that Facebook has, yet again, limited the way we interact with other people by imposing their own structure and rules: if you don't want a person to know you're paying attention to them, don't pay attention to them.

Your proposed solution of "don't add them as a friend" is even more restricted. Maybe it's your way of interacting with people, but I don't see how it's justified to try to impose it on everyone else.

So... you're arguing that people choose social networks based on more than the presence of a particular implementation of a single feature? Groundbreaking addition to your "all your friends are the same" theory.

Then people need to use Facebook differently. Seriously. What is hard to understand about Don't friend people you don't want to share info with?

This seems like common sense advice, like "Don't knock on the door of people you don't intend to speak to".