I recently realized that the number of FB friends that I have is getting a little too much to handle. There is a limit to manageable social connectivity, as I understand it, called the Dunbar's number (about 150 social contacts) and the aim was to reach this.
So, it was chop down time. And here were some rules.
- Keep people you meet almost on a constant daily basis. This list included officemates, fellow graduate students, IT support staff (very important!), cricket mates and other sports-mates.
- Remove faculty though (I didn't really have any on my list but this seemed like a general sound scheme).
- Remove religious nuts thanking god at every moment (even if they fall under Rule 1).
- Remove away the dude who gets 10 comments for every status message he shares and you can't figure out why (Exceptions - those who fall under Rule 1).
- Keep people you've truly enjoyed drinking with, and others who were OK drinking buddies (for now).
- Keep people you think you'll truly enjoy drinking with.
- Remove people whose friend request you've mulled on for a week to begin with.
- Remove people from high school whom you sent a friend request. You wanted to see where they ended up and now you know. Some have become fat and ugly. Most have jobs.
- Remove one time meets. There's only so much you can chat about that one meet.
- Remove people who take too many Farmville, Barmville and other permutations of sillyness. There's only so much Hide **** Application you can do.
- Keep people whose blogs you read, whose photography skills you admire and who have cute kids.
And the most important part is this - if you do get caught, make up an email-got-hacked story. You know - My email got hacked, people started getting random shit from me (Didn't you get any? Oh consider yourself lucky!) so I had to delete everything including facebook (And I'll surely add you as soon as I get on FB).
Trouble is, am still a 100 away from landmark number. So I need more rules. I suspect I might just use HGs filtering method of does-this-person-irritate-me.
It reached a point when from some 200 friends I found out I had 550 friends, I would just not deny friend requests and when you're not watching they add up. Professional contacts have no business being on my facebook, anyway.
ReplyDeleteI did a purging and I just asked myself 2 questions:
1. Do I know what this person is doing, where he/she is? Did I ever bother to find out? Would I be interested in finding out? If it was no, delete it was.
2. If I were to be in this particular person's city of residence for an extended period of time, would I look this person up? Would I bother to call, find out what he/she's been upto and try and meet? Nope? Then it was a delete again.
I managed to delete 300 people that way. If I have deleted a person and they send in a friend request, I just ignore it. Till they give up. :D
*Rushes back to her fb account to check if she's still on Barney's list.
ReplyDeletePhew! That was close :)
@Narco - Your #1 made sense. I actually thought of using #2, except that I was happy with not meeting with people when i visit their city. You know what I mean? I like just being in contact with some the online way, and didnt really care if I didnt hear their voice or meet them in person. But well done on the number!
ReplyDelete@Junito - Haha! You were never even thought of being removed.
I haven't been removed either!! YaaaayY:D
ReplyDeleteThank God I have a cute kid:D
got in by the last subpoint on the last point thanks to my daughter(that was close)...or did I?
ReplyDelete@PL and Shakes : lol
ReplyDeleteI crossed 100 recently - I used to have a policy of not adding anyone unless I met them in person and would delete if we hadn't spoken in over 6 months. Time to clean up again!
ReplyDeleteThats a sound one, Thanatos
ReplyDelete