Nick perfectly captures something I experienced about a month ago as well: accepting every friend request from everyone renders Facebook all but useless. Early in December I did much the same thing – removed a number of “friends” who were either people I hadn’t met (but knew, more or less, online) or people with whom I had only a passing relationship. Nick says it well:
So, don’t take it personally if I un-friended you – it probably just means you’re a geek, in which case you should be following me on Twitter instead 🙂
I felt odd about doing this at first… but Facebook is far, far more useful to me now. It’s primarily friends from high school, college, and law school, past co-workers and a few others. I find I’m sharing things on Facebook that are much less techie, and post work and geek stuff to Twitter. (For those who are interested, I’m on Twitter at twitter.com/rklau.) My blog has suffered in frequency over the last few years (indeed, it’s declined in frequency every year since 2003 – yikes!), something I aim to remedy in 2009. If you’re reading this and I un-friended you, please don’t take it personally. But my blog and/or Twitter are likely to be more along the lines of what you’re looking for. 🙂
One response to “Facebook is for friends, not “friends””
Good post. I'm nowhere near this, but I've heard Facebook limits the number of friends you can have, too. So if you want to friend a lot of people you don't know on Facebook, it's probably better to create a business page and communicate that way.