As Facebook ages, it faces an interesting generational problem. As people age, their friendships change, evolve. When they are in school, they might have one huge cluster of friends. Their friend list grows indiscriminately and is rarely trimmed. As they mature and move on in life, that large group of friends is curated, resolving into a smaller list of closer friendships. Facebook excels at building a friend list, but does not do such a great job at supporting the curation process.
Personally, I am rarely interested in unfriending anyone. I mostly want to fine tune who I follow closely, who I share with.
Interesting read. And, I think, an opportunity for a social network that recognizes the unfriending problem and that offers a more sophisticated friend curation solution.
I always use Facebook birthday reminders as prompts to unfollow.
A friend of mine lamented the other day that Facebook had become too much for him that he was going to quit it. I inquired why and he said he was being deluged with updates he didn’t care about, etc.
I couldn’t help but notice that he had over 600 “friends.” I told him that he needed to use Facebook in a different way to make it work for him.
This is how I use it, which actually matches my friend philosophy I developed in high school.
I decided that I had very few friends, I could count them on one hand and that I had many associates. To me, a friend is someone I could call up and to go out and do things and they the same with me. Associates are those I know and am friendly with, but not necessarily hang out with.
Facebook gives you the option to classify people in much the same ways. They have three classifications that matter: Close Friends, Friends and Acquaintances.
Close Friends are those who’s updates you’ll always see and ones you get notifications for. I have a hand full of friends classified as this plus my family members.
Friends is the standard setting for when you “friend” someone. These updates are likely to be on your feed (depending on how many friends you have) but you won’t get notifications when they post. Finally, Acquaintances (or Associates to me) are people you met, but don’t really care to see the intimate datails of their lives. Their updates are rarely on your feed.
Ideally, you’d have a few Close Friends, a decent number of Friends and a lot of Acquaintances. Otherwise, you’ll be loaded with updates you don’t really care about on a daily basis.
I started the policy to limiting my number of friends to something manageable. I started at 100 and then went down to 75. I may temporarily exceed that, on a provisional basis. It makes me retain a high signal to noise ratio. For instance, I unfriend people who never say anything (aka “holding up the social media contract”). Think of a FB “relationship” as a phone call. If someone calls you and sits there and only breathes, you would hang up on them. I unfriended my own mother for that reason.
I’m with Dave. I typically friend everyone who requests that I know, and rarely unfriend anyone. But I aggressive prune back what I see in my timeline. I think i see posts from about 15% of the people I am “friends” with.
When it comes to posting, I basically treat every post like it’s public on the web, and I use other social networks for more personal stuff.