Like the Skeletons of Soap Bubbles

On the path to paring down my presence on Facebook, I have mentioned that I want to eventually de-friend most of the people I'm connected to. While this sounds mean, it's worth remembering that I have literally no contact with the vast majority of people I'm "friends" with. A few years ago, when my love of the site was at its highest, it was thrilling to get friend requests from people I had not seen nor heard from in several years. When I was still in college, it was fun to be friends with people whom I might see around campus. Since those times, the purpose of Facebook has drastically changed. It used to simply be a place to declare your presence, make a statement, say, "Here I am!" These days, people gather around their news feeds like a water cooler at work. The problem is that I hardly know any of the people standing there with me. I've trimmed the content of my news feed down to a few dozen people, a list I call the "keepers." Of this list, only about 20 are on the site on a regular basis anyway, but those few are pretty active. But every other tenuous connection I have on Facebook represents nothing in the real world. The rest have to go.

To aid in my quest to tidy up my friends list, I was given some advice by my friend Thai, from UCSB, who directed me to his blog post on the same topic. He makes some excellent observations on the persistence of online connections even when the same relationships in the real world have evaporated like a soap bubbles (Have you ever seen the skeleton of a soap bubble? It's pretty cool.) until they're gone. They haven't popped, they have just ceased to exist. Along with his thoughts, my friend also provided a list of objective criteria for evaluating a "friend." This is just what I needed!

Here's Thai's list:

1) Will this person be at my wedding? If yes, keep. If no, proceed to next question…

2) Would this person pick me up from the airport? If yes, keep. If no, proceed to next question…

3) If I was visiting the city this person lived in, would I be comfortable meeting up with person for coffee & catch-up? If yes, keep. If no, proceed to next question…

4) If this person wrote on my wall, would I think, “WTF?” If yes, then delete. This is not a “friend.”

I've begun by creating a group in FB called "Not Even Coffee." Cold? Perhaps. But, let's be honest, if I wouldn't have coffee with a person, they won't miss me. And I'm okay with that.