I have 246 Facebook “Friends”. At least half of them are folks that I really have to stop and think before I can figure out who they are. Some of them are a friend of a friend, and others are folk who I vaguely knew in college, or who snubbed me in high school. My main activity on Facebook is rejecting invitations to a cause, or ignoring a poke or a water balloon. And it’s simply impossible to keep up with the various updates, notes, statuses, and so on.

A few days ago, I thought it might be a good idea to prune my list of so-called “friends”. I posted to my Facebook status:

Rich is considering trimming his Facebook Friends list. Nothing personal, but it’s just impossible to keep up

I immediately got several responses, with people saying that they hoped they make the cut, or giving suggestions of how to manage the firehose of data.

And as I looked at the list, I discovered that it was indeed hard to decide who to drop from the list. They’re all there because they contacted me and asked to be reconnected with me. With only a tiny handful of exceptions, they all invited me. I’ve only invited perhaps a dozen of the folks on my list. So presumably these folks had enough esteem for me that they thought me worth reconnecting with.

And, each person that I considered removing, I realized that it was, indeed, pretty neat to be back in touch with this person, some of them after more than 20 years. So … I guess I’ll just try to figure out some way to manage the data. Apparently there’s Yet Another Facebook App for doing just that.

But … I still can’t keep up with the endless stream of messages of one kind or another.