Friend Count

There's some interesting trends among Facebook user's that I've noticed over the past couple years. From high school to college, Facebook's utility seems to change. I can vividly remember for the early years it was my goal to obtain as many "friends" as I could on Facebook. The number grew and grew. People I met at camps or went to school with, everyone was getting friended. There was no discrimination. 

As time passed and I got to college I realized how dense my newsfeed was getting. I was getting updates about people I either hardly talked to in the real world or people I had no interest in knowing what their weekend plans were. With nearly 1000 friends, I wanted to start thining the herd so to speak. My goal was to whittle down the "friends" to people I actually cared about, or had some practical reason for a connection.

I sat down at my computer and started a mass purge. If I hadn't talked to a person or cared to talk to a person within the last year, they were getting "defriended." It got tedious clicking on each individual profile. I devised a new method. When their birthday notifications would pop up on my newsfeed, I would decide if they were going to stay or would be gone. 

How'd you like that? Happy birthday! You're not my friend anymore. 

I've found this method to work because it does not require a whole lot of thought and achieves what I wanted with a more "pure" Facebook. I found that by purging old aquatences that bothered my newsfeed I enjoyed my experience on Facebook even more. 

When I would go to scan my feed, I started to notice myself actually engaging in what I was seeing. Instead of seeing pictures of some guys family I had met once, I started seeing a lot more of my real-world friends and their activities. I feel that I lost a good chunk of aquatences but gained a better scope of my real friends and classmates.