Spring Cleaning: Facebook Edition

I did it, I cleaned up my facebook, finally!! It was arduous, but it feels great!

Ignore, block or delete? That is the question.

1. Annoying/irrelevant/unnecessary posters: I ignored all the annoying posters; the people who find it necessary to tell everyone their schedule for the day, as if it were somehow novel to go to the gym after work and then go out drinking with "ma gurls" later. The mom's who ask about the color of their kid's poop and if that means that little Johnny can be put into preschool early or not. The one who posts articles about that relevant topic that I won't bother to read.

2. I have 2,000 best friends that I talk to all the time: 634 friends, down to 555. If I'm being completely honest, I should have deleted more. But there were some people that I thought I might offend if I deleted them. Or I heard that they actually care about me and look at my page from time to time. Which means I should probably extend the same courtesy, but....nah. Too much work.

There are the people whose pages I only go on to see how their life is going, to make sure it's not going better than mine. The people I judge. I had to delete those ones immediately. That was a real conviction actually. I'll probably discover that I didn't even get them all.

Then there are those people that make you go, "Who is Katie Choi? I have actually never met this person in my life." Those what were you thinking friends? The, I want more friends than my friends, friends. It's nothing personal, I just don't know you, so I would like to reclaim a smidgen of my privacy if you don't mind.

Or the people that added you, so you think "well, I guess I can stay friends with them, I don't want to be rude. They did request me, after all." Go to their page... 2,000 friends? Yeah that's what I thought. They won't miss you. Deleted.

3. The Chatters: It's late, you just got home, you're doing a quick Facebook scan to see what's up with your friends. *POP!* Someone you don't talk to in real life wants to talk to you via Facebook Chat! You start typing hello, but then decide, no. It's late you want to go to bed. What's that? They saw that you were typing? They know you're there? Crap.

Here's what FB chat is for, to tell your friends some exciting/interesting news, to tell them to answer their phone, or to make a joke right before they sign off. All good reasons to use chat.

What is FB chat not for? Talking for no apparent reason. This upsets me greatly. Is there anything more annoying? Not really. If you don't have a reason for talking, then don't. Just spare everyone the awkwardness.

Solution: My solution was just get rid of chat. It's off permanently. Anyone who really needs me can call me or text me (or Heytell, whaaaat!). Or even tweet! But there's also a great tool, you can make lists on chat! I have two, the actual chat list for pretty much everyone, and one for those select few that I KNOW for a fact are Chatters. The list is simply titled "No", it's always turned off. So when I do decide to turn on chat to see who's on, I need not worry about being swarmed with chatters. They are contained. And they must just think I'm never on Facebook when they are.

All of this is in an attempt to get Facebook back to what it was, a way of communicating with friends. Sharing my life with them. I have a bit of a chip on my shoulder about facebook, it's annoying, I hate how I feel like I need it. It doesn't even mean anything anymore, and yet life has become so centered around it. It actually started to make me angry at social networking in general. (Except Twitter, she's different.)

But there is something to Facebook that I love, I can stay connected with my friends. It's an easy way to keep up with their lives as people are moving, getting married, having kids. (And yes, I am in THAT stage of life now, but I'm sure I'll do a different blog post about that some day!) That's the reason that I am so reluctant to delete it. Facebook isn't all evil. Only if you accumulate so many people on your friends list that you can no longer see why you got Facebook in the first place.

So there it is, Facebook Spring cleaning. Easy enough. And kind of fun too.