What the ... announcement?!?!?!

I get a kick out of "friends" on Facebook who make great announcements when they decide to pare down their "friend" list. Some of them create events and if you don't "attend" they take you off their list.

Everyone I know on Facebook has "friends" who really aren't. I am as guilty of it as anyone. Some are acquaintances and not real friends. Some may be people we "befriended" because you need them to play some of the games on Facebook. Some are friends of friends who sent a friend request and for whatever reason (they are hot, apathy, not wanting to not befriend someone, etc) we made them "friends" on Facebook. Some people seem to collect friends and take great pride in pointing out how many thousands of "friends" they have.

Then people start "cleaning" their friend list of dead wood but have to make a big production about it. It reminds me of people announcing they are leaving a web site, forum, club. They turn it into something dramatic. Why? For the attention.

If I am on your friend list and we aren't really friends guess what? I am probably not even going to notice you removed me since Facebook doesn't tell you when people remove you. So, I am not going to miss you. Now if someone like Stig, or people who are really friends, removed me I would notice because we actually use Facebook to communicate.

I used to play a lot of games on my Facebook account. As I mentioned, you pretty much have to befriend people you don't know who play the games if you actually want to get a head in them. What I found was that there was too much spam created by game messages and it annoyed my real friends. My Facebook page was spammed by game messages and whatever was going on in the lives of these people that I don't know and in many cases really didn't care to hear about. So I made the decision to stop playing all of the games except hockey and scrabble.

Once I made that decision the next logical step was to pare down my friends list to include only real friends. I didn't make an announcement because I know that those I remove will either not notice or not care. If they did they could always message me. But no one did for the simple reason that we weren't really friends. Hell, they weren't really even acquaintances. So why make a big production about it? To get some attention.