The campaign for real friends

I've been thinking alot about Facebook and Twitter lately as we at GayVancouver.Net (Gay Vancouver Online) are using social networks more and more ourselves to help get our message out.

But I am also a personal Facebook user, as is my partner. He actually spends more time on his personal Facebook page than I do (to be honest I can go several days without updating it although I have been a little better lately) and makes a real effort to connect with the people that are his friends commenting on what they are up to and keeping them up-to-date on his life as well.

A couple days ago he got an email from one of his Facebook friends telling him he had dropped him from Facebook because he he found some of his postings about his "homosexual lifestyle" not to his liking. Of course, the first reaction is to shoot off a nasty email in response but after thinking about it overnight he simply deleted the email and life goes on. Interestingly we did a quick look back over the last few weeks of my partner's Facebook updates and other than a few comments about attending the Vancouver Queer Film Festival we were at a loss to see what all the fuss was about. Now don't get me wrong, while one needs to take some care in what you might post on Facebook because you never know who might see it, a few mentions of going to see the Film Fest are rather mundane to say the least.

That got me to thinking about the whole Facebook friends thing. My total friend count on my personal page is 43. And to be honest, except for a handful, I cannot remember the last time I interacted with them on Facebook let alone saw them in person and REALLY interacted with them. If I were to guesstimate the real number of "friends" it would be less than 10 and probably more like 4 or 5. So what to do? Do I remove these people from my friends list on Facebook?

I'm thinking that instead of that drastic measure (after all, I don't want to be rude as we all know how devastating losing a friend on Facebook can be) I'm going to spend the next six months trying to connect with them on a deeper level. If after six months, I've not had a personal interaction (that does not involve a computer) then I'll drop them from Facebook.