unfriending guilt

originally posted on the posterous site. july 11, 2010 at 09:35:00am

i’ll admit it, i have it, and a pretty bad case of it. but i am getting better. at present, i have 196 friends on facebook, most of which i haven’t seen in years – some even a decade (yeah, the people from high school who can digitally track you down) and how many of them actually post on a daily basis or show up in my news/status feed – ten or twenty of them? i’ll admit i am a bad facebooker because I don’t actively search out my friend's posts or statuses, if they aren’t in feed then i don't see them… but still i find it difficult to un-friend these individuals, and i know it’s not the e-marketing professional in me who actually lives for numbers and analytics.

maybe it’s that i feel bad for the people who have friended me, what if i’m their only friend? or maybe it’s because there is a face attached to the profile and shared experiences from high school or life that makes it hard to just emancipate myself from them on facebook…who knows, maybe one day i'll figure it out and report back that "i'm cured..."

on the other hand, there’s twitter, that’s a whole other story all together. there i have determined i have no problem clicking the unfollow icon. that button has saved me from what i refer to as social-media diarrhea (ugh, did i really just use that word? it’s true though!) people tweet for the sake of their own stats and because they can.

for example, really how many handles does someone need on twitter, one maybe two – and that’s for those people who can separate business and personal -- i can't, i jumped the shark on that a long time ago, and said screw it -- judge me not by who i follow but by what i tweet. seriously though, i don’t need to follow all of your handles, especially when each handle posts the same thing causing your tweets to be the only thing i see when i log in or glace at twitter. you’ve got 140 characters to impresses me, not 140 characters multiplied by the number of handles you’ve harvested. that’s a sure one-way ticket to splitsville for us.

secondly, what is it with the people who have to direct message you with all of their tweets? i carry a phone in pocket, not the rabbit® (pop culture reference). unless you’re a news service or a family member, i don’t need or want all of your tweets via “dm”. you have just bought yourself a trip on the bus to no-man’s (or should I say no-tweeter’s) land.

i guess like everything, the anonymity that is the internet and twitter has afforded us (society, digital marketers….) has made it just as easy to click you out of my life, but put a face or shared experience, and well…breaking up is hard to do.

maybe there is a service (or app) out there that will unfriend people for you, since i can’t seem to…