George, I think there's a chance that you may be being a little harsh on your Mudcat ex-friend.
From my limited experience of Facebook (and limited is how I prefer it!) it seems difficult to do anything on that site without alerting everyone you've ever known and all of their distant cousins, whilst, at the same time, automatically generating a request asking them to add you as a friend!!!
True, there's a lot of friend "collectors" on the site, who seem desperate to appear popular, but a lot of those "add me" invites are generated by Facebook in order to propogate their network.

C-flat