Though still not a huge fan of Facebook, I decided that I hadn’t given it a fair enough shake. I was accepting just about anyone who friended me and wasn’t taking the time to manage those people into groups that received the information I wanted them to see (or not see).

A couple weeks ago I was at the point that I needed to quit or make a big change. I went with the big change. I pared my friend’s list down to people I truly wanted to be in touch with. Goodbye high school ex-girlfriends and classmates I didn’t talk to back then. Goodbye friends of my siblings who aren’t also actually my friends. Goodbye almost everyone. I went from 350+ friends (which is a pretty small number, I know) to just under 65.

It was the perfect move. I feel so much more comfortable sharing simple thoughts throughout the day and my news feed doesn’t get pounded with a bunch of shit I don’t care to read. Though it’s still early, I’d say the purge has helped my Facebook experience a great deal, and I don’t think I’ll consider getting rid of the service for quite some time.

It’s settled. I’m keeping Facebook. I know it sounds a little conceited, as though you were all sitting around twiddling your thumbs while I decided whether or not I would keep my Facebook. I was thinking about getting rid of it, though, and the reason I decided to keep it is actually kinda cool.

I read an article on TechCrunch just before I moved about ‘social media fatigue’ and what it means about your involvement in your favorite social networks. The author’s basic premise is that fatigue comes when you’re using social media too much, spreading yourself too thin over too many useless relationships.

I really appreciate that, mostly because I’ve always seen Facebook as little more than voyeurism. Yes, it has helped me stay in touch with friends from college, but to this day I get friend requests from people who were never my friends and with whom I haven’t spoken in a decade or more. I can’t stand that stuff, but when one of them has been my friend, I tend to let everyone in, and I shouldn’t have. So today I did my diligence and deleted everyone that I don’t know, everyone that I don’t talk to on at the very least a semi-regular basis, and anyone I don’t want looking at my pictures, my info, my posts.

It’s not just keeping Facebook – I want to get good at Facebook. Better, at least. I want to make better use of the tool for the thing I care to use it for, which is keeping in touch with the people I care about. When it stops serving that purpose, it’s gone.