It’s about that time for me.

I am going to have a sit down with my Facebook friends list and carefully consider who belongs there, who does not, and which family members need to be moved to the “Limited Profile” list. Yes, de-friending is a vicious process, but it has to be done in order to make way for new and more important friendships. Read: the people with the most exciting photos to stalk.

Anyway, as I sit here cutting out some of my 423 friends, these are a few of the people whom I’ve made dust in my virtual wind.

The Friend Who Desperately Wants You To Join YoVille
Facebook applications can be great. Who doesn’t enjoy a game of Scrabulous? But being bombarded with requests to join your farm or garden or pirate ship isn’t helping out your chances of remaining friends with me come clean-up time. Bye-bye application-addict. We’re ignoring you once and for all.

The Constant Status-Updater
I do not care what your plans for the day are.  Or what emo song lyics are accurately emoting your feelings at the moment. Or what color your poop is… no matter how odd it may be. If you are cluttering up my newsfeed with mindless chatter, you will surely be de-friended. But before we part ways, I want you to seriously consider getting a Twitter. There, and only there, will you be appreciated. Read More »

I write the following with the understanding that no matter how annoying Facebook can be, it will never be more annoying than Myspace. (Editor’s Note: I am not so sure…) And I will not stop using Facebook because of these things.

10. People You May Know. Otherwise known as “People that you don’t know well enough to be friends with”, “People who have rejected your friend request”, or “People you hate and would never friend even if their lives somehow depended on you friending them.” Facebook has been around long enough that if you haven’t found your friend yet, and he or she hasn’t found you, then you probably aren’t very good friends to begin with.

9. The Mini-Feed. Because you need constant reminder of the things you’ve recently done or said. Or applications you’ve added. Or songs you’ve listened to. Or things you’ve edited. The mini feed takes up like ¼ of your page (unless you are a dirty application whore: see below) and when you try to delete things, it keeps adding other things from days and weeks ago.

8. The Education and Work box. I say this is annoying, but it’s honestly the first thing I look at on someone else’s page. I do it because I am a masochist and I like to hurt myself by seeing how well these people that I hardly know are doing in places that I would love to move to. Read More »

I owe Mark Zuckerberg a thank-you note for the many hours of procrastination and ability to do brief background-checks on guys my friends or I have dated, but my love for the Facebook pales in comparison to my adoration of the best application ever.

I admit, I was what a communications professor would have categorized as a “laggard” of technology users (See? You use these random bits from class sometimes!), and I absolutely, passionately, vehemently loathed the applications on Facebook. A good friend of mine went so far as to title the profiles with superwalls, superpokes, the ability to throw sheep at people and start zombie fights as “MySpaced out profiles,” and we would roll our eyes together at how lame our generation had become. Was it not enough that we had integrated Facebook into our daily lives, making it a verb and using it to evaluate our acquaintances and friends alike? Lame, indeed, twenty-somethings. And so I was a staunch hater of all things that were not on the original Facebook.

That is, until I discovered Scrabulous. Read More »