The days of bragging about the number of people willing to be declared as your ‘friend’ have been replaced with a world where making eye contact with a complete stranger can lead to a new notification.
I currently have 617 Facebook friends and I’d be lucky if I could name half of them just by looking at the profile picture, let alone seeing them in person.
However, I still balk at the suggestion of deleting even one of these complete strangers. What if they decide to invite me to an awesome event I wouldn’t otherwise have heard about? What if I end up in a class with them next semester and have to awkwardly add them again? Or worse, what if my best friend from pre-school decides they want to start reminiscing one day and I’m no longer available for them to talk to?
THANKFULLY, Facebook’s Friend Lists option allows me to friend all the people I have one friend in common with and appease my O.C.D. tendencies at the same time.
If you decide to try out Friend Lists yourself, here are some ideas for possible groups:
- Family Members: You can’t delete or ignore them because that would make the holidays awkward, plus you get free birthday reminders! Having all of them in one group makes it easy to adjust privacy settings to avoid certain photos, status updates and wall posts. This group can also be expanded to include co-workers.
- Hot Guys I’ve Never Talked To: This list isn’t actually very long, because I haven’t had the guts to add these guys in the first place. I’ll just keep hoping they don’t change their privacy settings (Thank you one friend in common from Freshman year!) after catching me stalking them during class.
- Creepy Guys I Don’t Want to Talk to Ever Again: Hardly needs an explanation. Nicer than outright blocking them, especially with the options to “Unsubscribe” and to hide all your updates from with one easy click.
- People You Like to Judge to Feel Better About Yourself: Admit it, even if you haven’t actually created this list yet, you already have one started in your mind. The only reason you keep reading their terrible statuses and refreshing their profile to see new pictures rather than blocking them is because you would miss all the bursts of self-confidence.
- High School/Middle School/Elementary School: Best for playing “Where Are They Now?” and organizing reunions. May overlap with Groups 4 and 6.
- People You Only Have One Topic of Conversation With: That semester you studied abroad? Yeah, it was crazy. Yeah, your roommates are tired of hearing the same story about that one night at that one club in Berlin. Thankfully the other people you traveled with are more than happy to relive the memories every so often. This goes the same for people you sat in the corner with at that terrible party and became best friends with by the end of the night, but have yet to see in person since.