Facebook Spring Cleaning: 1678 to 221 Friends in Less than an Hour

It was time. I had built up a lot of faux-friends through all the social media projects I've done. Triathletes, models, social media geeks, etc, etc, etc. My facebook account was out of control and honestly I haven't been using it much as a result. I tried the Hide thing but that's against the grain of social media. If you're friends you want to hear from each other. If you don't then you're not friends.

Unfriending 1400 people isn't easy. For each one you have to click the little X and then confirm the deletion. I looked into their API a bit, considering writing an app to do it for me. But either the API doesn't support unfriending or I didn't look hard enough. Either way... about an hour of clicking and my facebook account is fresh and zingy. I think I'll even add my friendstream to my android tablet now.

If you think you've been unfriended unfairly, you probably have. This is mind-numbing work with a lot of clicking and I can guarantee that I unfriended some people I didn't mean to. So, apologies... reach out to me please.

For Facebook to remain relevant they're going to have to make it easier to unfriend. Their friend lists are a huge step forward for organizing friends. With a single "Unfriend Everybody in this List" feature they'll remain relevant. If they don't I believe that people will tire of their over-inflated friendstreams.

People can only maintain a certain number of friendships. I find it interesting that when the dust settled I have about 200 friends. That's in line with Dunbar's Number which was popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point. It says that people can maintain somewhere around 150-200 friends. The argument that social media can help you maintain more is valid, in my opinion. But I'm naturally an introvert and so 230 is probably a good bit bigger than the social network I'd have without Facebook.

I suspect that many/most people have a lot of cruft in their FB accounts. This waters down the value of even logging on and at some point Facebook will have to address it. As with most big companies, I suspect they'll only address it after it's too late. And therein lies a billion dollar opportunity. Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, TheNextBigThing.

Today I also decoupled my blog and status updates from Facebook. I'm just looking for less interaction, I suppose. Or maybe I'm just getting old. Back in my day...