My mom friended me on FB a couple of months ago. At first it was kinda weird, then I realized that FB is just a method of keeping in touch with friends and family. I haven't lived with my mom in 6 years and FB helps us stay connected on a daily basis. However, I put my more vulgar friends on notice and have deleted some of their crass comments.

Since becoming a pledge and friending half of the chapter, I monitor my FB hardcore. I don't take pictures with alcohol, I rarely complain or swear in my status updates or comments and I make sure to use decent grammar and punctuation. It's not too much of a stretch considering I'm pretty conservative to begin with, but I figure why jeapordize my pledge process because of something so stupid?

As far as defriending people, I only friend people I know (except with SL) so I never had to defriend a close contact. I've hidden feeds before because a couple friends overwhelmed my homepage, but never defriended.

(But seriously, a whole thread about defriending people?)

Your perception might change once you are out in the "real world" and have several worlds colliding on your FB. People from different areas of your life - HS, college/sorority, family, online-only friends, co workers from several different jobs, people in your neighborhood, hobbies/clubs, church friends, etc.

When you're in college, you pretty much have your friends from home, your college friends, and family - IRL and online. The lines tend to blur when people on your friends list have varying levels of familiarity. Also, people change over time. Someone you are really close with right now might end up becoming someone you don't want to be part of your online reality. You might choose to hide some people from appearing on your wall, you might block some people from seeing your pictures or updates, etc. And yes, you might defriend people.

Those of us who didn't grow up on the internet tend to still maintain those barriers we have built up over time. Some things, we let our family in on, some things, we wouldn't want a coworker to know. Pre-internet, it was easier to manage those identities. If we want to be part of the online world, we need to tools to keep the same sense of compartmentalization.

This is a bit of a longshot, but is it possible that the original friend request occurred during one of FB's famous upgrades? Each time that they alter/uprgade their layout, I get all sorts of glitches happen. This includes a friend request where my friend had access to (and appeared on) my wall and profile, yet I did not have access to her profile at all. I kept getting the "only certain people have access to this profile and you must friend her first" message. This was a "real" friend so there was no privacy issues, and via email we kept laughing at what was happening. She even kept writing on my wall "Are we friends yet?"

Once the few days passed, and there weren't those annoying glitches, then I sent her another request and everything showed up the second time.

33's idea is also plausible.

I guess I don't understand why you'd add these people in the first place. The only thing I've done remotely like that is add this guy that my pen pal knows - she suggested him because he does really good movie reviews.

I just want FB to shut up about how Mark only has 10 friends or I haven't connected with Carolyn in a while. MYOB, Facebook.

The worst for me is that it keeps suggesting friends that have passed since the creation of their facebook profile.

It'd be great if that stopped.

I do a bit of acting locally, and they were people who I didn't know personally, but with whom I shared mutual "friends". I initially accepted them for networking reasons, but after after 6 months or a year of no introduction or contact, I decided to get rid of them. From now on, I am being more selective of whose requests I accept. I get about 20 requests a week, but only keep about 250 "friends". Some people in the industry thrive on having over 1000 friends, but I don't need to collect names.

I agree with you on the suggestions to contact people. It's annoying!

I've added two people that I didn't know but were friends of DoctorD's. One of them, a guy she went to high school with, has a hilarious sense of humor and we found ourselves hijacking her status comments with long, humorous dialogues. One day, he sent me a friend request and said "you're frickin' hilarious, can we be friends?". Since then, we've gotten to know each other through messages and status updates, etc. His girlfriend, who also went to high school with DoctorD and is one of her friends is also a friend of mine now. We have also gotten to know each other pretty well through private messages and chat. I hope that the next time I visit DoctorD, I can meet these two as well. They are a lot of fun and seem like really good people. The bonus for DoctorD is, we don't hijack her status comments all the time anymore :)

I am older than you may realize, and I'm not part of the recent generation that has grown up on the internet. I have many people on my FB including coworkers from 2 jobs ago, friends from high school (5 years ago), people from my fraternity and people I work with on school group projects. I'd say my network is pretty diverse, but if one of those people chooses to defriend me on a social networking website, I don't get upset about it (unless it were a close friend or family member). They did it for whatever reason, and I have other ways to get in touch with them if I need to.

It's a social networking tool. It's a method to stay in contact with people that is easier than calling or writing. As a result, it's easier to discontinue those relationships. Yes, there are hurt feelings but I don't see a difference between defriending someone and never calling or writing, except that defriending is more immediate and obvious.