Facebook Unfriend

Facebook Unfriend

I have been looking at the word “Friend” for so long that the spelling is starting to look strange. F.R.I.E.N.D. Weird.

I have been doing a clean-up of friends on Facebook – unfriending people that I actually don’t know… and even a few that I don’t want to know anymore too! It’s not to be nasty or anything, but a friend request may make sense now, but does that same friend request still hold true 3 years down the line, 5 years down the line? Some friends are not friends, they are colleagues, acquaintances, and people I’ve met while consulting, even people that are now working at competitor companies.

Moral of this story – be careful of accepting friend requests!

Any friend will have access to the private profile information that you’ve decided to share. They’ll continue to have access for many years to come… or until you unfriend them! Just pause and think about that for a moment.

Facebook makes it a tedious process to unfriend people. There is no quick way to select a group and unfriend them all in a batch. You have to click on the Friends button, wait for the dynamic menu to load and pop up, click Unfriend, and then wait for 5 to 10 seconds for the query to run. Then repeat the whole process on the next friend. It’s very time consuming when you want to clean up 100+ people! To add more frustration, Facebook does not seem to sort your friend list, in the same manner, each time a page loads. So, if you refresh the page, your friends are all randomized again and you start from the top of the list again… slowly following the unfriending process.