Image via CrunchBaseEverybody seems to be into social media these days. I have accounts on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn that I use on a fairly regular basis. Even my parents have gotten into Facebook. They send messages to family members and play games like Scrabble online all the time. My LinkedIn account is fairly clean, and is only used to connect with people that I have worked with or done business with during my career.When I first started with Facebook, I primarily used it to connect with family and friends. I since have gotten sucked in to several games on Facebook, and have a lot of "friends" on there that I will never know beyond they cyber world and those games. At one point, I cleared out or "unfriended" a bunch of people but went back and added a lot more as the games started requiring more friends or neighbors to compete tasks.
Twitter is another one of those sites where I followed a bunch of people that I really have no interest in following. For a while I was an active member of Sponsored Tweets, and was trying to build up my followers in order to get paid tweet offers. However, since Sponsored Tweets has gone to premium memberships, my opportunities are starting to dry up, actually, they are non-existent. I am getting ready to cut those I follow on Twitter down to those that actually tweet things that interest me.
Those kinds of decisions on who to unfollow or unfriend are fairly straightforward and simple to make. There are some that I wonder whether or not it appropriate to "unfriend" on Facebook or other accounts. That would be the question of whether or not it is appropriate or proper to unfriend a person who is an actual friend or colleague who has passed away.
I posted a few times how Facebook allowed me to reconnect with two of my closest high school friends. We were fortunately able to get together a couple of times after reconnecting before one of them passed away suddenly. In the slightly more than a year since he passed away, I have had at least three other friends/colleagues that have passed away.
It saddens me to log into Facebook and see ads that say so and so likes the Redskins fan page, or another friend has a birthday coming up. On one hand, I think there is no reason to keep them on my friend's list as they will obviously not be posting anything any longer. On the other hand, it is nice to go their page on their birthday to see tributes from friends and loved ones. Then there is another part of me that thinks it would be something inherently wrong to unfriend those we love and miss.
that is a tricky one actually, it would be sad to unfriend your friend, as as you say it is good to see the tributes. Perhaps this is something that facebook has to address, as it must be possible to keep an memorial page, without it updating their birthdays and things.
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