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.

The Strange Man from a Foreign Land
I’m not sure why I ever accepted you to begin with.  We have no mutual friends and your profile isn’t even written in English. And is that a fanny pack in your photo? If you ever make a trip to NYC, let me know.  Until then, adios amigo.

The Couple That Can’t Decide if They Want to be Together or Not
They’re together. They’re broken up. It’s complicated. She’s single. He’s not. They’re engaged. Where does it end?! Maybe if you get off Facebook for a second you’ll be able to figure out your relationship. But my newsfeed does not need to be the first person on the scene at your breakup. Send me an invite to the wedding, snail-mail style, because you’ve been de-friended.

A good Facebook de-friending spree can be a cathartic experience. But don’t go too remove-happy.  There are risks involved. I once de-friended a guy that was in my freshman year history class because I thought he was lame and didn’t need him cluttering up my friends list. Now he is dating my best friend and refusing to accept my apologetic re-friend request.

Oh how the tables have turned.

Do you do a yearly clean-up? Who do you un-friend?

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.

7. Bikini profile pictures. Yes, you are young and skinny and attractive and you have great times at the beach with your girlfriends. I get it.

6. Picture-takers. One of my best friends is one of these people and has, last count, 60 photo albums on her page. 60! That’s not 60 pictures, 60 albums. And so, on any given day, there will be ten or twenty new pictures of her on my news feed. I love her to death, and I never tire of her face, but girlfriend has 1462 pictures on facebook. Seems a tad much.

5. People who spend too much time on facebook. And totally take over my news feed with twelve different, whiny status updates a day (“Douchebag Jones…is still in love with her.” “Douchebag Jones…wishes she knew how this feels”) and the copious addition of applications. Which leads me to…

4. People who update facebook with the minutiae of their lives. “Douchebag is sleeping”, “Douchebag is eating cheese” “Douchebag is playing World of Warcraft”. “Douchebag feels lonely”.

3. People who have way, way too many applications on their page. Applications make the page totally unreadable and impossible to navigate, not to mention totally obnoxious and boring. I propose a 5-application limit. Which leads me to…

2. Stupid g*ddamn applications. Flair, pin-up quizzes, movies, books, causes, werewolves, vampires, scrabulous, Entourage, super walls, heroes ability, which Sex and the City character are you?, lolcats, growing pets—all. too. much. And totally uninteresting to anyone that goes on your page. And honestly, do you keep up with them? My least favorite one is the compare people application, because there is always that one friend that is #1 in everything! Makes me feel like crap.

1. Application invites. They make me turn-into-the-hulk mad. I don’t want to be on your zombie army and I don’t care what stupid thing you have written on my fun wall. And if I wanted to see what superlative you nominated me for, I have to download the whole effing application to do so. And then the application tricks you into sending invites to everyone on your friends list who, if they are anything like me, will resent you for it. And I’ve yet to find the “turn off all application invites” option if such a thing exists.

Getting that off my chest should make me feel better, but I find myself so. tense. Maybe one of my friends will send me a FB drink to make me feel better….

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.

Perhaps because I am not at all athletically inclined, I get incredibly competitive for word and board games. You get to literally play a game of Scrabble with a friend of your choice, and you can start as many as you want at once. The application keeps track of points and tiles for you, even tells you if a word exists or not, and maintains a record of your stats as a player. Basically, it’s as close as you can get to playing in person, only the games stretch out over how often you and your opponent are on Facebook.

Granted, there are some drawbacks to Scrabulous, such as not being a fast enough alt-tabber to hide the Scrabble board from your computer screen when your boss walks in, and sometimes you can be left high and dry by an opponent who doesn’t log on for a few days. No big deal, it just gives you time to strategize, and at least you can explain to your boss (should they comment anyway) that you’re just trying to expand your vocabulary before that big meeting.

Some tips and tricks for the Scrabulous addict:

1. I’ve been screwed many a time by opponents who save their big-point letters for the end. Try doing this yourself.
2. The two- and three-letter words are key. It’s all about using multiple letters from one word to build your next one, make the most of those points.
3. If your game seems a little dull, try adding some commentary in the Message section. Sometimes talking smack can add to the enjoyment of your class/workday.