Comments on: Unfriending, an experiment

By: ParatrooperJJ

ParatrooperJJ — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 15:30:35 +0000

That’s correct. The privacy and group settings have really been expanded.

By: Alex Kreit

Alex Kreit — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 11:28:19 +0000

I can see the appeal in unfriending, though for those who are considering mass unfrieding sprees, I’d like to quickly suggest that many of the same goals can be accomplished through the use of facebook’s privacy and feed settings. Facebook is useful for both keeping up with friends and staying connected to acquaintances who you might otherwise lose touch with (for professional networking, etc.) While limiting your network to folks in the close-friends category will give you a lot more freedom to share personal information via status updates, etc., it also means you’ll lose out on being able to take advantage of the benefits of staying connected to other acquaintances. Setting up optimal privacy and feed settings can be a much more time consuming project than just unfriending those who are not close friends. But, for anyone who wants to limit most of their facebook info to close friends but is worried about sacrificing the networking benefits of facebook, I think it is time well spent. For example, thanks to the privacy settings, I was able to start accepting friend requests from students, which I think will be a great thing down the road for keeping in touch with students after they’ve graduated.

By: Brendan Ding

Brendan Ding — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 06:06:08 +0000

As a survivor of the Sag FB friends massacre, I feel both humble and proud. Perhaps I will even take the lesson to heart and start my own war against ghost friends.

By: Spencer Waller

Spencer Waller — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 23:21:16 +0000

You have given me courage, although I don’t know that 99 is the magic number for me. What about just hiding everyone whose tweets and blogs are too much?

By: Joe Miller

Joe Miller — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 15:33:39 +0000

Brilliant.