Jul 11
11
This morning I read a blog entry from a dear blogger who I follow quite closely and whose opinion I greatly respect.. and also happen to have 4 children with.
In my wifes blog entry, she writes about the various type of friendships she acquires and has acquired.. the reason friends become her best friends and others fade away.
Worth the read.. but as I am a man, and a technical one at that.. i decided take that thought to a different place, and was thus prodded me to post an entry on the topic.. albeit with a spin.
While perusing Facebook, I look at the mass of information from a collective of people who I label , as facebook forces me to, friends.
Every so often I also post a status message to the ocean of these friends. Some friends may care what I write.. some have already blocked me.. or sometimes, facebook has already hidden my feed from that person without my knowledge, placing me in a persona non grata in his feed.
As we all do,, we scroll down through the wasteland of status messages.. proving our wit with some random comments, commenting on photos, or simply FaceStalking x-girlfriends or lovers.
Once or twice a year as I skim my facebook feed..I decide.. ENOUGH.. I am a decent guy.. but there is no way in hell I have 400 friends..who I need to communicate daily to.
I navigate to my friends list and begin the bi-annual defriendATHON and delete people off my list who I havent heard from, who havent communicated with me on facebook.. and those involved in multi-level marketing or play Farmville.
I can usually purge 10% at a sitting.. and on some occasions I get some pushback from a “friend” who messages me nothing short of “You bastard.re-addme ” But overall.. no one notices.. no one cares.. and my friend feed become that much more relevant to me.
These useless friends are not entirely useless but they dont belong categorized as a friend.. I may know them, I may have bumped into them.. hell, I may have dated them.. but that shouldn’t subject me nor them to my rants about tequila or my views on the Middle East.
Then there are my edgy comments,, often perverse or off color.. with whom I’d share with my friends, but would rather my Mother not to comment on.. and she does..often.
There are some FB friends from highschool with whom I enjoyed spending 4 years of my life with.. but havent seen in 18 years. There are some from Jewish Day School, who would be put off with some of my posts.. There are friends from my time in Cleveland, and my time in New Jersey.. There are friends here in Israel.. but when you need someone to talk to .. or decompress with. these arent necessarily the people you go to… Has Facebook forced us to blur the line between .. ya i know him.. and ya i knew him. ?
Welcome to Google + . Here my useless friends have a home.. inside a circle. There may be a time where I would like to address them.. tell them something interesting.. have them read a blog entry about them… I can chose to keep them close.. but dont need to bother them with every cute thing my little girl does.
Google+ has re-redefined how we classify our friends on an offline world. We have our circle of friends whom our families are interconnected with.. our circle of friends from our community.. a wider circle of people we know.. and circle of people who play farmville.
I imagine there will be concentric circles, people who meet a few criteria.. and even circle hopping.. but as friends can be transient.. facebooks approach of one label, one type of friend is disingenuous. We live our lives within circles.. it is nice to finally see an online representation of our offline environment