I was talking to my best friend and we got around talking about how more personal facebook is for us. We never got around having more than 600 friends which I believe is a small number now in fb.
I find that a bit ironic since I keep a public blog but what some people don’t know is that bloggers choose what to reveal. Unlike the threat of having your facebook posts as annoying spam on the newsfeed, Blogs are seeked out by readers.
In essence, it’s the same in fb but the difference is people know you. You are seeked out as a person and not by the subject you are writing.
I write mainly for fun and though I give a glimpse of my personal life every now and then, what I write is definitely only an edited fraction of the sum of my everyday existence.
Anyway, going to my facebook account, I noticed I only have about 500+ friends in my more than two years of actively using fb. I rarely invite contacts and still have to wade through my friend requests. But still, I wondered do I really have 500++ friends in real life?!
This is one of the reasons why I keep a separate business fb account. I wanted to keep my account as personal as possible.
In this time and age of voyeurism, sometimes its hard to set standards in “making friends” in an online network.Its a personal thing, yes but one must admit the number of followers you get on Tweeter, the number of friends and likes you get in facebook are starting to account so much more than they should.
One afternoon, I finally decided that I was going to start tidying up my fb account. I realized fb for me is not a collection of people; I want it as much as possible to reflect my real social graph. I really just have a small criterion on being “friends” with people in fb: If we at one point in our lives had some sort of link—and a happy one at that.
I for one wouldn’t feel offended if one removes me from her/his list provided I really don’t have a present relationship with her/him anyway.
It wasn’t really anything personal when I started trimming down friends, but I suppose somebody you haven’t talked with in years or someone who couldn’t even greet you on something as momentous in your life like getting married or having a baby or something that only happens once a year such as a birthday don’t bode well as a “friend” for me in real life. Why then should it be any different in my online world?
Unless of course we go back to the subject of voyeurism—we only want to know and see what others are up to or the other way around: we want people to know and see what we are up to.
I must admit I’m guilty of not being a good “fb friend.” Life gets in the way of fb-ing all the time but at the end of the day, building a social graph is not a game of accumulating the most number of friends and followers. Building such an impersonal group only threatens to dilute the value of the network that we hoped would bring us closer together in the first place.
What do you think?
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