The Great Un-Friending of 2009

Published on by Nick Bradbury

If we ever friended each other on Facebook, then there’s a good chance you’re annoyed with me right now for un-friending you.  But I swear it’s nothing personal.  Lemme ‘splain.

I’ve been on Facebook for a while but I never really used it – the UI felt clumsy and cluttered, and I just didn’t get the appeal.  But lately I keep running into people in the “real world” who swear by Facebook, so I decided I should take a second look at it.

BTW, when I say “real world,” I mean the world away from my computer and the small circle of geeks I cocoon myself in.  If you’re not familiar with that world, it’s worth a visit.  Nobody cares what OS you’re running, what browser you’re using, or whether your HTML validates.

Anyway…because I never used Facebook, I just blindly friended anyone and everyone.  Which now, of course, makes it such a noisy place that I can’t possibly spend any time there.  So I pared down my list of friends to a much smaller group of semi-related folks in the hopes that I’d better understand why so many people like Facebook.  And the first people to get cut were my geeky friends.

So, don’t take it personally if I un-friended you – it probably just means you’re a geek, in which case you should be following me on Twitter instead :)

14 thoughts on “The Great Un-Friending of 2009”

  2. Nick, I was never your friend on Facebook, but apart from three internet celebrities I only have people I have actually met in real life on Facebook.
    My three celebrities are muted anyway. I don’t care what they have to offer.
    Facebook still needs to be able to have different types of profile for the same user though. The PUBLIC profile, the PROFESSIONAL profile, and finally the PERSONAL profile.

  3. @Jez
    You can have your regular profile as your personal profile.
    If you want to have a professional profile, you can create a page for yourself.
    So Nick Bradbury could have his own Page, and people could become fans of him and his work. That way he doesn’t have to have those people as his friends.
    I also only use Facebook for my real friends. I do not treat it as MySpace, where people just add anyone and everyone.

  4. Came across this saying a long time ago–don’t remember who said it :-)
    The internet–where the men are men, the women are men, and the 13-year-old girls are FBI agents.

  5. OT but not sure how else to get your attention. Comments appear to have been dropped from archived posts. For example, the “Everyone Loves Ads in FeedDemon!” post is listed as having 74 comments but only displays around 25 and all are dated the date of the original post i.e. December 13th; any comment after that appears to have been dropped. I know they were there up until a few days ago as one of them was mine!

  7. @Nick: Many thanks for the quick fix. One last OT as I am here; the advertising issue aside, would a FeedDemon Wish List topic be a valuable start to the new year? I have a suggestion which IMHO makes an existing facility usable (as opposed to unusable) and one which I would be interested to hear other opinions on not the least yours. I did pass it on in some post installation response (I forget the exact mechanism apart from it being Newsgator instigated) but heard no more.
    Thanks again,
    Chris

  9. @Nick: Thanks for searching the forums but as you discovered, I hadn’t posted there (I now recall I used the feedback facility in FeedDemon). Anyway, I have now posted to the forum (see “Is it possible to exclude feeds from the panic button ?” topic). Apologies to everyone for the OT posts!

  12. Heh, when I first read the title only I assumed it was still about the advertisement issues :)
    Funny, huh?

  14. Nick, just wanted to say hi to an old friend. Hope you and your family are doing well.
    Al

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