So I finally did it last night. I took back my Facebook page. That is right I am back in control again. It was actually an amazingly refreshing experience… going through and deleting over 150 friends off of my list.

Now if you are one of those 150 people please don’t be offended it was nothing personal. But it had gotten to the point where I actually couldn’t keep up with my closest friends and family. I joined Facebook to share pictures of my son with my parents… to keep in contact with good friends from high school and college. I did not join Facebook at that time, to chat with business connections, to “network,” to play games which are addictive for 3 days and leave you wondering why you hadn’t volunteered your time or donated plasma instead and been productive with that time. I did not join Facebook so that I could be poked… so that I could know what city in Minnesota I should have lived in… so that I could have a level 10 Dwarf Warrior in Dungeons and Dragons’ Tiny Adventures. Nope… not why I joined.

So last night I did it… took the plunge. I cut over half the people on my friends list off. Now they’ll never know when I take a survey or find out what Sex and the City character I am most like. I’ve gone back to what the social networking application was meant to do for me.

Now don’t take this as a rip on Facebook or on social media. Quite the opposite. Social media has grown in leaps and bounds over the past years and has made many people’s lives easier with faster and broader communication. One status update on Twitter or Facebook will notify everyone you care about (or who cares about you as the case may be) in an instant rather than requiring massive email lists or countless precious cell phone minutes. But as with all cool new things it can get out of hand if you let it.

My opinion… if you have over 200 friends on Facebook… you really don’t care about all of them. And I’d be willing to guarantee they don’t all care about you. If you are following over 250 people on Twitter… you really don’t care about all of them. If you think your Mr./Mrs. popular because you have 1000 followers on Twitter… congrats to you… but most really don’t care. The more of us that go through with this splurging of random social connections the better off we’d all be and in my opinion the more useful social media would become again. Fight to stop the fake-friendship spam of social media. It starts with you.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 10th, 2009 at 1:16 pm and is filed under Risdall Marketing Group. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.