I'm slowly but surely reducing the number of people who I have listed as "friends" on Facebook. That doesn't mean that I have less fewer "friends", but just that I'm tiring of reading updates from people who I barely know as though I were a real-life friend of theirs.
This ends up being a slow and tedious task since the user interface doesn't have an easy one-click unfriend from a long list - instead you have to go to each stranger-friend in turn, select a drop-down menu, and scroll to the bottom of it to make your "friendship" go away.
Of course, friendship doesn't really go away. I have fond memories from years ago of many of these people, and if I were to meet them again in person I'd like to catch up. But I really kind of resent Facebook mediating the relationship and re-reminding me about people who are out of my present orbit. I'd rather get some absence rather than synthetic telepresence, and try to make the heart grow fonder by giving distant relationships some of the distance they are due.
