Almost everyone uses Facebook for one reason and one reasone alone – to connect. Marketers want to connect with their existing customer base and potential leads, family members want to connect with members who live far away, and people like me use Facebook both as a marketing platform and to create new connections. It has been something that has been bothering me quite a bit lately. I want to delete my friends and family members on Facebook, but I don’t want them to think of me as an asshole. Well, today I ended up removing quite a few.
Facebook is huge and it has become an integral part of our lives. But I don’t think it has to be that integral that a husband and a wife have to be friends on Facebook. It can’t be that important that you have to be friends with people who you see every week. Honestly, I care about these people, a lot, but I don’t need to know whats going on in their lives through Facebook. If it’s important enough they will call, better yet they will drive over. If they hvae a picture to share, they will bring their camera along. Seriously, adding people that live so close to me, some in the same household, I don’t really see why Facebook needs to be a bridge to connect. We are already connected, and we are connected well. My wife certainly isn’t going to send me a grocery list as a Facebook update on my profile, and my friend isn’t going to tell me an embarassment story on Facebook.
My only reason to use Facebook has always been for two reasons – to use it as a marketing channel and to connect with people and build relationship with ones that I haven’t yet. It’s like a coffeehouse. You might go to a coffee house and talk to someone. You don’t know them yet but they are good contacts, you want to know them. Until you know them, you might as well talk to them at the coffe house. But when the relationship is close enough to share phone numbers, invite at the house and be a regular in their lives, we don’t need that coffeehouse to connect. The relationship has blossomed and it doesn’t need that bridge to connect those two persons. Facebook is a bridge for me. It is a tool. I don’t need it to connect with people who I already have solid relationships with. My friends and family members are pretty active in my life. They share, they call, they come over. So why do I need Facebook to connect with them? I don’t.
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Hi, My name is Ritu. I am a member of SMA (Social Media Anonymous) ;-) & help bloggers and businesses utilize the social web. 
I think you have a very good point. For people who use Facebook the way you do, yours is the best approach. You hit the nail right on the head with this one.
Another way of looking at it, is that FB is just another information channel to connect to your friends, including close ones. FB update status might be more suited for some communications rather than SMS text messages.
Ritu,
Facebook is what you make of it and what your goals are for using Facebook. I also “defriended” quite a few people on Facebook in the last month simply because we weren’t connecting at all or getting to each other.
Many of the people I removed are simply on different time zones and there’s no way for us to really engage with each other on a regular basis – at least not with any sort of depth.
I have several family members and real-life friends on Facebook, but the majority of them don’t read my blogs and aren’t interested in blogging whatsoever. Blogging friends do seem to use Facebook as their RSS feed and pop on over to my blogs through the Networked Blogs feature, or when they see a new post I’ve done show up in the stream. The fact that Facebook “friends” actually visit my blogs and sometimes leave comments is pretty much all that matters to me.
Bro,
I will have to disagree on this a little bit, it may make sense to remove few from your FB friends list but to identify who you want to keep and who you want remove may be tricky….
I just wanted to let you know that FB has enabled us to catch up on older times as if we were sharing our Friday afternoon talks …. though not physically with our thoughts being shared and pics posted FB does tell you what your loved ones are upto specially When you are too busy to call or get to talk …..