Facebook Friends?

Inspired by Megan's blog post, I set out to categorize my own Facebook friends. Periodically, I go through and un-friend people that I'm not really in contact with anymore. I've never un-friended someone maliciously, or because of a disagreement or fight; I'm usually just un-friending because I'm out of touch with the person and not interested in their life anymore. I just went through a week or so ago and un-friended maybe 18 people. If any of them noticed, they haven't mentioned it. I probably don't notice when I'm un-friended (although I have on a couple of rare, mysterious occasions).

My list right now looks like this:

17 Close Friends. These are people I see regularly, communicate with regularly, love, search out, miss when I'm not around them, and will probably be friends with for a very long time. We actually have very little communication through Facebook, since we communicate in other ways more regularly.

11 Family Members. Some of these are close family, like my mom. Others are distant aunts or uncles or cousins I haven't seen in years.

7 Professional Contacts. These are people whom I've met through work and continue to interact with to some extent - we have lunches occasionally, they ask me questions, and we are otherwise interested in each other's lives on a professional-acquaintance level. We are probably also friends on LinkedIn, which is more suited to this type of interaction.

12 World of Warcraft Friends. This is a special category. I hesitate to call these friends "online friends", because they mean so much more to me than that. These people should actually probably fall somewhere in a category that borders on professional or acquaintance, except that I've only ever met them in World of Warcraft. In general, I "see" these people online every night, and we interact on a regular basis through the game. I know about their personal lives to some extent - sometimes only their name and location, other times much more, like birthdays, occupation, likes and dislikes, family, etc. I like spending time with them in the game, we generally work well together and know each other's strengths and weaknesses, we joke around, have fun, and it's likely I've known them for a couple of years now, at least. I might even be "real life" friends with them if we lived closer and were in a situation to so do.

38 Acquaintances. These are people whom I do not see regularly, probably due to some physical distance, but try hard to see whenever I can. I may have met them through a friend, or in college, or through work, and we attempt to keep some modicum of contact. I am interested in these people, and would love to see them more often, but it just doesn't work out that way right now.

159 College and High School People. These are people with whom I went to high school, had a college class, saw around campus, met through a friend, or otherwise hung out with once or twice and made the marginal effort of politeness to friend one another via Facebook. For maybe half or 2/3 of these people, I'm interested in knowing about their lives and like having them on my social networking system. For the rest, I probably should un-friend them because we probably aren't too interested in one another.

I have 244 Facebook friends. Could I be stricter with my friending? Probably, but I'm happy to say that I've never friended anyone I completely don't know and I've never gotten a virus through Facebook. I will probably go through again real soon and un-friend more people. It's not that I don't like them; it's just that their News Feed spam crowds out the information from people I do want to know more about.

I don't have a problem with social networking, or having tons of friends through a social networking site, or being friends with/communication with people you don't really know. It's the internet. It happens all the time. If someone wants to have 2000 Facebook friends, why not? That's what interests them. It's just that, personally, I want to use Facebook in a much narrower scope.