Letting Go Can be Hard to Do!

How many Facebook friends do you have? How many “real” friends do you have? What’s the ratio? If the ratio is more than 2:1, I say that you have too many Facebook friends. Really, it should be less than 1:1, since in a perfect world, you’d want to stay in touch with all of your friends, but I’ll let that one slide for now.

I was looking at my own Facebook account recently and I realized that I have too many myself. It starts innocently enough. You meet someone and think that it will develop into a real friendship, so you connect with them online. A few months later and you can’t even remember who they are when you see them in your incoming feed. This is the whole reason why Jimmy Kimmel proposed the Annual National Un-Friend Day.

There are practical reasons why you want to minimize the number of friends that you have online. If they really aren’t that close to you, why are you sharing personal information with someone who is essentially, a complete stranger? You barely know this person and you’re providing them with enough information to become a celebrity stalker, assuming of course, that you are a celebrity.

Even if they are no threat to you, can you say the same thing to every other friend that they have made online? Because if they share your updates onto their account, their privacy settings, not yours, can take precedence. That opens up your posting to “who knows” who?

Don’t wait until Jimmy’s Un-Friend Day to “trim out the weeds” as he says. Now’s as good a day as any.