Tips and Challenges for National (Facebook) Unfriend Day on November 17

November 14, 2010March 18, 2011Digital Citizen Leave a comment

I’ve recently written some posts on purging your Facebook friends list due to the misuse, abuse and harm of Facebook friendships incurred by many people (links below). The issue has recently gotten more attention via talk show host Jimmy Kimmel calling for Wednesday, November 17, to be National Unfriend Day of NUD, and I am here to help with some tips and challenges should you want to take part in National Unfriend Day. This also goes for MySpace, LiveJournal, Bebo and other social networking platforms where you can add friends, but the main focus is on the largest social networking platform in the world, which is Facebook.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Why you would want to take part in Unfriend Day (or do it on another day)

Because Facebook friends can be spies, now or in the future when someone decides to no longer like you, especially people you don’t know well but have as Facebook friends. With Facebook’s new Friendship Page feature that gives everyone creepy new spying capabilities on other people’s profiles, the fact that Facebook friends can be spies has never been truer. Facebook friends have access to everything you have unless you block them from specific things. But let’s be serious. How many people really do that? And even if you did, isn’t that enough of a creep factor to get you to unfriend them? And why are you causing yourself stress in watching your back on Facebook all the time since you might have to block certain friends from potentially every new thing you post?

Jimmy Kimmel talks about unfriending because Facebook has cheapened the meaning of friendship. I have also written similarly about the meaning of friendship versus Facebook friendship. However, there is a real life threat to Facebook friendship and not just an ideology here.

If you missed National Unfriend Day, there’s no reason NUD couldn’t be any other day during the year for you. In fact, I would recommend you purge your Facebook friends list several times during the year.

Facebook activities don’t get you in trouble, Facebook friends who see them do

It seems to me we’ve had enough bad stories of people getting caught on Facebook for everything from cheating to hate statements to inappropriate work comment and other such bad behaviours, but not many people still care all that much. Just remember, those behaviours aren’t what got those people in trouble. It’s the fact they had Facebook friends who saw the behaviours and did something about it, even if unintentional like sharing it in some way, online or in real life.

Which Facebook friends should you unfriend?

This could be tough for some people to do so I have a set of questions you can ask yourself of each Facebook friend you might consider removing. These are for the less obvious choices, but can be for any one on your Facebook friends list.

Will people think you mean for dropping Facebook friends?

Hardly. People seem to think that those with tons of meaningless Facebook friends are the ones who are insecure. Knowing who your friends are, and who are not, is a sign of personal security and integrity, not being mean.

What if the unfriended request being friends again?

If you have common friends with someone you untag, they may notice having been removed if you post something on your mutual friend’s wall and they see it by looking or a notification of others posting on the same post. They’ll probably only realize it because they see your name and realize they hadn’t seen any updates from you in a while. So what if they add you again? Awkward?

Maybe. But you can avoid it by blocking them after you remove them. Or ignore the friendship request. If it means that much to them, and if you have any real friendship in life, they can talk to you about it. If you have any real friendship in life, this Facebook friend stuff shouldn’t matter. Really, it’s not the end of the world.

Need some motivation?

Try my Remove 5 Facebook Friends challenge. This was posted on September 30, by the way, 5 weeks before Jimmy Kimmel asked for National Unfriend Day. 🙂

For those who like to flaunt their life fun on Facebook, especially if there’s a little element of risk to it, how’s about flaunting your Facebook unfriending Facebook tagging style?

Facebook friends dumped tagging meme

I highly recommend you do this after you unfriend the people you tag, of course. Now, you can’t tag a picture with a link to someone you aren’t Facebook friends with, but you can always type in their names instead of choosing from a box listing your Facebook friends. This is like if you were to tag a photo of the Loch Ness monster, Darth Vader, Wolverine, Harry Potter, Bella Swan or anything else. They don’t have Facebook profiles, so far as I know, but you can still tag them in pictures. Same idea for Facebook friends you’ve dumped.

Good luck with National Unfriend Day, Jimmy and the world!

I don’t know how much media clout, or pull, Jimmy Kimmel will have in proposing National Unfriend Day, but it’s good advice. Even if it doesn’t do well, it’s the first year. Things take time to adapt, and more time if it’s a once a year occurrence. But remember what I said above…

Remember this fun Facebook in Real Life video? It needs a seriously creepy update!

Remove 5 Facebook Friends Challenge

September 30, 2010January 13, 2011Digital Citizen 8 Comments

Nov 6 2010 update:
This article just became much more relevant after Facebook introduced the Facebook Friendship Page feature on Oct 29, 2010.

Many, if not most, Facebook users have more friends on their Facebook Friends list than are good for them. Having more Facebook Friends means more people are watching you. There more people to waste your time, even if just having to sift through their updates to find ones from people you care about. There are also more people who could use something on your profile against you in some way, even if it’s just gossip, possibly from misunderstandings or unintentionally. We’re not even talking about potential creeps and malicious people here, who you don’t know well but had casually added as Facebook friends over time.

On a different topic, there are all kinds of Facebook memes, or trends, going on all the time. Facebook tagging is big. Facebook notes get passed along. There was that 25 Things You Didn’t Know About Me thing that only helped making your ID easier to steal. Then there were the baby photos or retro photos trend that also helped in the case.

So how’s about putting the two together for something useful?

A challenge to remove 5 Facebook Friends and pass it on!

These would be “friends” in the loosest sense of the word, of course, not any real friends. I don’t think most people need any help to do this challenge if they want to take it up. That’s how frivolous I think the Facebook Friends thing has become for most Facebook users. However, if you need help or want to do a more serious purging, check out some of my criteria for identifying Facebook Friends you can remove without a lot of consequences.

I took up my own challenge, of course, and went way over 5.

Can you?

If you don’t take the challenge, maybe just ask yourself, can I remove 5 Facebook Friends from my list? It’ll give you an idea of the state of your Facebook Friends list to where it maybe should be.

If you can remove 5 Facebook Friends from that thought experiment, maybe you ought to reconsider, especially now that you know you can. It’s just some clicking and scrolling now. 🙂

Or try it Facebook tagging style! (obviously you can’t tag these friends’ profiles, but you can tag and type in their names)

Facebook friends dumped tagging meme

Which Facebook Friends Should I Remove?

September 29, 2010March 19, 2011Digital Citizen Leave a comment

Nov 6 2010 update:

This article just became much more relevant after Facebook introduced the Facebook Friendship Page feature on Oct 29, 2010.

Most people on Facebook have far more Facebook Friends than friends they have in real life. It is for social networking, after all, not deep friendships. However, every one of those Facebook friends is watching you, in a way, with Facebook’s notifications and updating system. How many stories have you heard about people caught cheating on relationships, lying for jobs or scholarships, and the like, because of something they did on Facebook that was found out by someone else? Even some misunderstandings of your actions and/or comments can be a lot of nuisance. These public mistakes, visible to all your Facebook Friends, are so common now you might even know someone who has been subject to it! But it’s not that a person did something wrong on Facebook that was the problem. It was that it got picked up by someone else who was probably on their Facebook friends’ list. Privacy settings can’t protect against Facebook friends. Well, they can, but if you have settings against Facebook friends, you should just remove them.

Having a Facebook Friends list closer to your real friends list means you have to worry less about who might get you in trouble. You can also misbehave a little bit more without worrying much about the consequences. Don’t kid yourself if you don’t think there are potential consequences. You’ll also waste less time screening through notifications looking for updates by those you really care about in life.

Keeping your Facebook Friends list up to date is the solution to many of the potential problems previously listed. Keeping your Facebook Friends list up to date means removing people from time to time, not just adding them. It is a judgmental act to remove Facebook friends, but seriously, if you made a wrong call, it’s just Facebook friendships. If you’re real friends to any extent in life, they’ll forgive you and you can be Facebook friends again.

So which Facebook friends should you remove? Well, you choose your own criteria. But here are a few I have found useful… in no particular order, and sometimes in combination as they are not absolute.

Do I feel like removing them or care enough to keep them?

I trust my feelings on this one. If I don’t remove them on gut reaction alone, I sometimes override that with other “thinking” criteria below.

Do I know who they are right away?

Some people’s Facebook Friends lists are so large they can really answer “no” to this question for some on their list. “Facebook whales”, or people with over 1000 Facebook friends, may find this criteria interesting to try. If I can’t remember someone on my Facebook Friends list to the extent I know them right away, I chuck them.

Would they remember who I am?

Facebook whales are prime candidates to be tossed under this criteria. It only takes knowing a few hundred people’s names for someone to seem like they remember everybody, but they really don’t. This criteria is a little hard for people to answer “no” to, because it makes them seem so unimportant to someone else. I just suck it up, so if I have any doubt a Facebook Friend might know who I am, I toss them.

Can I name 3 specific things about them not recently on their updates?

Knowing who someone is, is not exactly a deep criteria. If I barely know who a person is on my Facebook Friends list, I often remove them unless I know they will probably be a useful contact for me in the future. These are the people I often added because they might be a useful contact to me in the future, in the first place. I’m not very discerning to add Facebook friends, but I am to remove them.

Do I hide their status updates or block them on my privacy settings?

This one isn’t absolute for me, but I have eliminated Facebook friends on it. With some people, they’re real friends with annoying habits I put up with cause we’re friends. What people put up with in any type of relationship is more than what they’d put up with strangers due to the bond of the relationship. So I hide their statuses but keep them as Facebook Friends. However, if I’m not real friends to some extent, and am annoyed by their status updates, I tend to remove them. I can find other ways to contact them if I really need to. Certainly, if I ever considered blocking people to any extent with my privacy settings, I remove them.

Have I had any contact with them “lately” (like maybe a year or more)?

If I haven’t had any contact with a person in over a year, I usually remove them. Contact doesn’t mean they have to initiate the contact, but that they should respond to contact I have with them. Some people are so bad they don’t do that, in which case, no need to keep them. I can still be friends if we only ever communicate in real life, but there’s no need to have them snoop on me. We can become Facebook friends again later if they appear in my life again. Technical problems I can’t understand is a good way to explain what “happened” to our previous Facebook friendships.

Do they update their Facebook profile?

The main reason I use Facebook was to be in touch with the lives of people. If they don’t update, that defeats this purpose. We likely wouldn’t have had much contact, either, in which case, off they go!

Do I have them to avoid awkwardness?

There are times when I add people to avoid awkwardness, like partners of female friends. After a while, if I don’t develop any type of friendship with those partners, I remove them. They’ll have had their “check-in” time to make sure I’m not after their girlfriends or spouse. I also know I’m not doing that so the partner’s “jealousy” becomes his problem, not mine.

Those are the criteria I have so far. I may have more in the future and will add if so. If you have suggestions, please do share.

A Few Thoughts on Facebook Friends (and some polls)

August 17, 2010March 19, 2011Digital Citizen 2 Comments

The average Facebook user today has 130 friends. But how many of them would that average user really call a friend? And by friend, I mean just “friend”. I don’t mean anything like “true friend”, “real friend”, “good friend” or the like. Just someone you’d call a friend.

That would be hard to get a consistent answer since different people have different standards for who they call a friend. For some, only the truest of friends get called a friend. For others, anyone who might have followed them on Twitter, or vice-versa, counts as a friend. What we need is some sort of standard definition for “friend” to move this forward.

Aristotle

Interestingly, a good definition for “friend” can be found over 2300 years ago courtesy of the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC).

According to Aristotle, there are three types of friends, in increasing level of strength and sincerity:

Contacts or those based on usefulness or utility, sometimes known as acquaintance;
Drinking buddies or those based on pleasure (to use the word conservatively); and
Good friends or those based on shared virtues.

If we accept all three of these categories to be friends, as Aristotle called them three types of friends, we then have a pretty broad definition of friend, but one which I would be happy to accept. Question then is if these definitions are still broad enough to cover how most people decide whether or not to add others as friends on Facebook. That would take a lot of resources to not only survey but to also verify. I doubt the folks at Facebook would even be able to do the latter conclusively, though I think they have a pretty good idea along the same lines I do.

From what I have seen and read of people and how they use Facebook, as well as who uses them and how, I would argue that a lot of people’s Facebook friends fall outside of Aristotle’s definition. So one would either need to expand Aristotle’s definition of friends to include these slightest of Facebook friends, or these slightest of Facebook friends aren’t really friends.

At first glance, Aristotle’s contacts category seems broad enough. After all, these slightest of Facebook friends are often people a user would have met only once, if that. They probably serve only as potential usefulness, never mind true utility. That is, they get added cause one never knows when they might be useful, not that they are likely to be useful in some way. Many people have Facebook friends just for the sake of upping their count and feel more people are paying attention to their Facebook activity. Others to avoid some situational awkwardness, like being Facebook friends with someone’s partner just because s/he is the jealous type who wants to keep an eye on their partner’s Facebook activities, when one doesn’t really give a damn if they exist. However, this adding of potentially useful friends can only happen to a point before users would not be able to remember people on their Facebook friends list. That is, if you asked them if so and so were on their Facebook friends list, they wouldn’t be able to tell you with certainty. Or if you asked them the name of certain people who are actually on their Facebook friends list, they wouldn’t be able to tell you anything about them at all, including how they got on that list in the first place.

I don’t know what the approximate average number of Facebook friends one would need to have before they would start forgetting everything about someone on that list, but I can tell you the situation would be true for some Facebook whales . That’s the term Facebook has for Facebook users with over 1,000 friends. Seriously, one thousand people is a lot of people to remember names and something about them. But if you don’t buy that people can remember details about a thousand mostly generic people, perhaps you’d believe the situation of not being able to remember anything about some Facebook friends would be true for those who have reached Facebook’s friends list limit of 5,000. Yes, there are those, too.

Poor Aristotle must be turning over in his grave at what some people constitute as friends today, though I’m sure he wouldn’t expand his definition of friends but rather state those slightest of Facebook friends are truly friends at all.

So after all that, maybe you’d like to weigh in with some opinions with a comments, like how you’d define a friend or why you keep Facebook friends you might not remember anything about, etc. Or maybe you’d just like to take some polls on Facebook friendship below (or see how others responded). The sample from this blog will be skewed because a lot of people come here for Facebook related activities so they tend to be avid Facebook users, but I’m just curious to see.

Other Facebook user facts:

Canada has the 4th highest Facebook user rate per capita as of June 2010 with 47.9% of Canadians having a profile. This trails only Iceland (59.6%), Norway and Hong Kong, in that order.
Canada has the highest Facebook user rate per capita among nations with 10 million citizens or more.
There are 16 million Facebook users in Canada.
Quit Facebook Day is May 31. A measly 30,000 quit worldwide of about 465 million users. Most “I Hate Facebook” type groups and pages are actually hosted on Facebook.
Canada signed up 912,000 new users in May 2010 alone.

Can’t We Find a Better Term Than Facebook Whales?

August 17, 2010August 17, 2010Digital Citizen Leave a comment

The people at Facebook call Facebook users with over 1,000 friends Facebook “whales”.

For a hip company in a hip business like social media, that’s about as “un-urban” a term as I thought they could come up with for the urban dictionary of new slang.

“Sub-urban” would be the more appropriate term, as that’s like Latin for “below” or “less than” urban. But Latin’s too old and logical to be hip.

So can’t we come up with a better term?

Flake?

Fake?

Fimp or Frimp? (Friend and Pimp)

Falker? (Friend and Stalker)

Follector or Frollector? (Friend and Collector)

Fliend? (Flake and Friend)

Actually, I’d save fliend for people you add but you don’t really want to. You just add them to avoid awkwardness. An example might be a boss you don’t like but who may have a thing or suspicion for you. Or a partner of someone you know who wants to keep an eye on activity between his/her partner and anyone else who might be a “threat”… or who is just jealous of everyone else in their partner’s life. You get the idea.

Fliend. Yeah. I kind of like it! Someone you don’t particularly like sends you a Friend Request. You have to reluctantly accept it so you say Sure, I’ll be your FLIEND! 🙂

But I digress. Back to the original topic.

Maybe none of those are great, you know, and probably a little too judgmental for Facebook to put out there, but for the people outside of Facebook, can’t we come up with any better idea than Facebook whale?

Maybe there’s a term out there already? After all, the Urban Dictionary has terms like Facebookemon for all sorts of Facebook related activities, habits and people.

Can someone inform me or suggest a term?

Flesch-Kincaid Grade Reading Level: 6.4

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