onygo

From time to time, I clean up my Face­book friends list. Face­book — to me — is primar­ily a private com­mu­nic­a­tion means. Busi­ness com­mu­nic­a­tion hap­pens else­where — i.e. Linked­In, twit­ter or XING. Google+ could also become some busi­ness tool. But I still don’t use it too intensely. It’s been a while since I’ve done my cleanup the last time, but hey… 

So how do I clean up my friends list. First ques­tion I ask myself is for sure »Who is it?«. If I can­’t answer that the con­tact is likely to be deleted. And that even if it could have been a close friend who just used some kind of pseud­onym­ic name. I’m not against pseud­onyms, but I want to know who I am com­mu­nic­at­ing with. I espe­cially hate pseud­onyms like Li Sa. How the hell should I know which Lisa they are? I also use pseud­onyms — I’ve been using my two pseud­onyms for more than ten respect­ively more than five years. If I don’t remem­ber who belongs to the pseud­onym they won’t pass the barrier. 

BTW: using some pseud­onym for Face­book does not help with pri­vacy issues with Face­book them­selves. They will be able to identi­fy you. The data min­ing they do — from a tech­nic­al per­spect­ive — is likely to be awe­some. Why? Just because it’s their busi­ness mod­el. If you don’t want to be tar­geted and iden­ti­fied by Face­book, don’t use it at all. But that is also the case for products of any oth­er play­er. Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and any oth­er build their busi­ness mod­el on tar­get­ing their cus­tom­ers as good as pos­sible. 

Next bar­ri­er is: Would I know about what to talk with them when meet­ing them in meat­space? Am I inter­ested in meet­ing them in real life? If not: arrivederci. 

Last bar­ri­er is: do I want them to know what I am talk­ing about on the plat­form? If not: you can imagine… 

And any­one adding me as a friend should pass all those bar­ri­ers, too. 

But why do I do that? I want less noise on Face­book. I don’t want to block app requests. I want to know what my friends are doing. And I don’t want every­one in my net­work to know what I am think­ing. I want to refo­cus Face­book on friends. 

I tried to accom­plish all that by using lists and all that Face­book pri­vacy stuff, but all I cre­ated with that was a big murp. It became too com­plic­ated to man­age besides. So I decided rather to delete friends than organ­iz­ing them in groups I won’t under­stand later on.