Put the End in FriEnd: Nov 17th is Unfriend Day

This Thursday, November 17th marks the first ever Unfriend Day, according to Jimmy Kimmel--the day where we allegedly declare that all this social networking is notworking to improve the status of our relationships.

Last week we talked about exing Exes and how deleting them from our Facebook pages can be an empowering and reasonable move. But do we really have the balls to delete "friends" just because they send us virtual livestock and spam us with emails begging us to "like" companies and products we've never heard of? I don't. But I predict that others will.

According to social network theorists no one person can manage more than 50 relationships. So what does that mean for people managing 1000+ friendships? It means they can forget who people are and why they are important. Just the other day one of my friends told me that she got a message from a guy asking her how she was doing and when she was coming back east for a visit. She told me she couldn't even place him untill she saw that I was their common link and realized that during a weekend visit to NYC she let him feel her up in a drunken cab home.

Then today I talked, actually tweeted, with two insightful friends on the matter. One said his filter would be that he has to have met people in real life in order to accept their requests online and that he would use twitter for "digital friends" and Facebook for all things personal. Did I mention he and I never met? (Note to self: don't friend him). The other commented that he had the urge to purge and was only going to use Facebook for close family and friends. Sounds pretty reasonable to me. That is, as long as he doesn't plan on going to his hometown bar the night before Thanksgiving. He might have some explaining to do.