Rant against Facebook “Friends”

I’ve been using Facebook for a number of years now, and I’m still a fan of the social network. I suppose “fan” is a poor choice of words in this context. . . namely because I’m about to rant about Facebook “friends”.

Over the years, I’ve managed to collect over 200 friends on Facebook. It’s not that I’m popular in any way – but Facebook basically allows you to track-down (*ahem* stalk) people you barely know. Like many people, I “friended” acquaintances from years past because I was curious to learn what they’ve been doing lately.

In many ways, this is a really cool thing. Ever wonder what happened to that girl you had a crush on in 4th grade? You’re two clicks away from the answer!

That being said, I’ve started to resent the “Status Feed” on the homepage. . . particularly because the same 10 people use Facebook all day long. One girl in particular answers every damn quiz she can find, and each one is displayed on the status feed. Are you kidding? Get a life.

In a fit of Facebook rage, I revoked my friendship from about 100 people. Most of these people weren’t violators of the status feed, but rather were people I haven’t talked to in years and probably won’t ever speak to again.

Friends I’ve lost today:

• The college roommate who refuses to talk to me
• The above roommate’s really annoying ex-girlfriend
• More annoying girls I only knew from the bar in college
• People I had college classes with who had no personality
• High school acquaintances who thought they were cooler than me
• High school acquaintances who I’m too cool for
• Friends of friends who I wouldn’t recognize on the street if my life depended on it

The survivors of this purge were people who I either work with, have some familial relationship with, or actually talk to on a mildly regular basis. One or two are people I simply find interesting. The rest of the list received the axe.

On a side note, I noticed that a handful of people I used to be friends with have revoked their friendship from me. I don’t know the motives behind such actions, but I won’t take it personally. Some might consider me a violator of the status feed (this blog gets syndicated through my “Notes” application), and for that I apologize.

In the end, Facebook might look at MySpace’s status feed for a better example of how to fix this problem. MySpace allows you to select the friends whose status you actually care about, though MySpace has a slew of things I hate about it. . . which I’ll save for another post.