Voted 2009 Word of the Year

UNfriend

The prestigious New Oxford American Dictionary has chosen their 2009 word of the year. The definition is:

unfriend - verb - To remove someone as a 'friend' on a social networking site such as Facebook


I have a FaceBook account, as well as MySpace, Twitter, and this blog. I never update or use MySpace, in fact I should just delete it. My blog has taken a back seat to my busy summer and my addiction to FaceBook.

My FaceBook account is a quick easy way to keep up-to-date with some bloggers, friends, and family. I've recently been using it to connect with classmates I lost touch with.

::: Waving hi to Barb, Angie, and Diane :::

I had acquired a couple hundred "friends" and started to wonder ... why am I on these friend lists and why do I have so many I don't really follow? I started looking through my list.

Some were bloggers, people that I still read their blogs, yet have no idea about their day to day lives and therefore, I'm lost in the dust with their "status updates." I had quite a few friends and family that didn't keep their news feed up-to-date, and rarely, if ever, commented or left a note on my FB wall. Even my kids friends have "friended" me. Ironically, they comment on my wall more than some of my personal friends.

Point being, I had more "friends" that sat along the wall, not a peep or update out of them, than active connections.

Don and I have "friended" some of the same people. One night, we were both on FB and I saw updates from mutual friends that weren't showing up on my wall. After checking around, I found out FB doesn't post every update, how could they? It's more of a random thing. So if you have a few hundred friends, you're not getting every ones status updates.

I suppose it's no big deal, but there are some people that I enjoy their humor, or their news links and they were getting bumped by my having friended so many.

So, I did the unthinkable ****G A S P **** I unfriended people off my list. I started slicing and dicing and knocked off close to 75 names. After the purge, I did a "status update" about it and I had several people follow suit, saying they totally agreed, and pared their lists too.

Now, I get more updates from the majority of the people on my list. I no longer go crazy trying to go back through updates seeing what I missed, and I'm able to comment more on others updates.

I was listening to a debate on a radio show on this whole issue. The callers and the radio personalities were hilarious with their opinions. You can just imagine ... the whiners, the politically correct theories, the friend collectors ... a whole blog post of its own!

How did we ever survive without social networks?