An experiment in friendlessness

I've long hated Facebook, not the least reason being that it uses the word "friend" to describe all of one's contacts on the site. "Friend" means something specific to me. It doesn't mean "That person I met once at a conference but would never recognize in a crowd." It even doesn't mean my mom, though I do consider her a friend.

But Facebook just has one big "friend" designation for all of my contacts. My wife becomes a "friend" in the same way as someone I barely know. I hate it.

So, today I decided to dump all of my friends, or nearly all of them. I went into Facebook and "unfriended" myself from 90 percent of the people with whom I was connected. Basically, if I don't talk with the person on a daily basis, or if I can't get away from seeing them on at least an annual basis (i.e., family :-), I scrubbed them off the list. I tried to answer the question, "Does this person, or should this person, care what I'm doing today?" If the answer was "No," I removed them from the list.

In the process I eliminated a wide range of people that I really like, and some that it would probably be in my financial interest to be "friends" with, like Tim O'Reilly, Craig Mundie, etc. In some cases, like Tim, I removed people that really are friends "in real life," but whom I expected probably don't want to see my family pictures and what not.

In short, my elimination of "friends" is probably just as arbitrary and coarse-grained as Facebook's inclusion of "friends," but I'm trying to figure out if I'll use Facebook more if it's a close-knit group of people that might actually care what Lily did today, and first off know that I have a daughter named Lily.

If you were on the list that was removed, don't fret. You won't be missing anything. I can't remember the last time I used Facebook. If you're on the list, you won't be getting anything, either. But maybe, just maybe, I'll start to use it more. We'll see.