Ignore People – or making the most of social networks

25 May 2010

In the beginning I accepted every request. When a graduation class group started, the invites started pouring in like a flood. I accepted all of them and before long I had over 300 friends on Facebook. These days I have 136, and regularly I go through the list and prune it here and there.

I get invites from people I know, and I ignore them. I don’t ignore all of them of course, but I have built criteria over time.

So, what’s the most valuable real estate on Facebook? My feed is the most valuable to me. That’s how I keep up with what the people I care about are up to, and I make sure that I don’t have to sift through things that are irrelevant to me to see it.

Maybe if I read my feed non-stop it wouldn’t matter so much, but as I only check it every little bit, having a mountain of friends will mean you miss a whole lot.

Case in point, my family owns a restaurant in North Carolina. I live in Bellevue, Washington over 3,000 miles away. Now logic would say “it’s your family so accept that request!” but I say no. Any events, specials or news they share will be of no use to me. It may be a bit militaristic, but if the individual family members I follow are on Facebook, I will see what is up in their lives, I don’t need to follow their workplace.

The same goes for vague acquaintances from high school, college and past jobs. Sure my close friends stay, but I see every person that I don’t have a close tie to as potentially erasing information from people I do care about by bumping them down the feed.

I refuse to believe that I have even 136 friends that I should be following so closely, but I have settled at that number…for now.

I guess it comes down to what do you use a social network for. If you are of the narcissistic camp and just want everyone you have ever met to see how awesome you are now, collect away. If you are in the community camp, keep your friends to people you actually engage with and you might find it to be a lot more useful, fun and relevant.

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Tags: Facebook, Social Network

2 Responses to Ignore People – or making the most of social networks

Chris P.

May 26th, 2010 at 7:52 am

I did the same thing about a month ago and as a result facebook is more enjoyable. Once my friend list grew, I began to realize that some of these people have changed since I last spoke with them and not all for the better. Do I really still know all of these people? Do I really want to share all of my personal information and daily happenings with them? My criteria: I must have communicated directly with the person in the last two years.

Marc

June 6th, 2010 at 8:30 am

I’ve stopped using Facebook quite some time ago. Honestly, I’d rather live in the real world, surrounded by my friends and not just their pictures. The only networking site which I still use is Linkedin because it really comes in handy in my line of work.