OMG, We're Not BFFs Anymore? Getting 'Unfriended' Online Stings

12-26-2008 National:

Users of Social-Networking Sites Delete Friends Who Don't Keep in Touch, Misbehave

JoAna Swan recently purged her profile on social-networking site Facebook Inc. of friends she hadn't spoken to for a while. A week later, Ms. Swan, a 21-year-old student at Pace University in Manhattan, ran into a woman she had dropped.

Crammed next to Ms. Swan in an elevator on the way to class, the woman, an acquaintance from freshman year, called her out for "unfriending" her and asked what she had done to deserve it. Ms. Swan considered saying it was an accident, but then opted to be honest. "It's nothing personal," she recalls saying. "I just delete people I no longer talk to."

A week later, she ran into the woman again, and decided to refriend her because, says Ms. Swan, "she seemed very offended by the whole thing." She declined to name the woman, noting that it would "make things more awkward and turn into another whole drama-fest."

Unfriending online "friends" is emerging as the latest offense in the world of social networking. Sites such as Facebook and MySpace allow people to build personal profiles with photos, videos and up-to-the-minute updates about their lives, then to share them with select users, or "friends." The process has even turned the word "friend" into a verb, as in, "so-and-so just friended me on Facebook." Users agonize over whom to friend (your mom? your ex-boyfriend? your boss?), and worry about whether their friend requests will be accepted or ignored, lingering in cyberspace in what some dub "friend purgatory."

-Note: I guess MySpace, and others, have "Unfriended" RSOs and their families. Do I understand that correctly?

Now, people who have accumulated hundreds, or in some cases more than a thousand, friends are cutting loose some of the ones they have lost touch with or who were little more than acquaintances from the start. It's a shift from the days when users, eager to boast about their online popularity, added new friends with abandon, whether or not they really knew them.

Privacy Pitfalls
Adding to the downsizing push: Consumers' growing awareness of the privacy pitfalls of sharing personal details with casual associates or total strangers. And as social networks encourage users to share more stuff -- from videos to games to invitations to join causes and fan clubs -- all those extra friends are creating a lot of extra noise.

"I really don't need to know about every little detail of your business or social life or that you've changed to a new brand of peanut butter in some sort of weekly email," says David Dalka. The 40-year-old Internet marketing and strategy consultant from Chicago says he has dropped some half-dozen of his hundreds of connections on professional networking site LinkedIn Corp., for the offense of adding him to mass email lists.

A LinkedIn spokeswoman said the company encourages "members to only connect to people they care about and would want to help."

Most sites allow you to remove friends with a click or two, but they don't notify people when they've been dropped. Sites say that's a decision designed to mitigate any awkwardness and to respect users' privacy. A Facebook spokesman says the Palo Alto, Calif., company isn't concerned with the impact of unfriending and it prefers to "leave the delicate etiquette of defining online social norms" to its users.

Finding the Truth
On MySpace, the leading social-network in the U.S., users can ditch unwanted friends by checking a box under their names on an edit screen. Users can also reward close friends by dubbing them "top friends," meaning their names and photos will be listed first on the friend area of their profiles. A spokeswoman for MySpace said the Web site "empowers users to make decisions about their profile privacy" and to control whom "they choose to be friends with."

Some people are stepping up their efforts to find out if they've been dumped. Keren Dagan, a 39-year-old software engineer in Lexington, Mass., uses a service called Qwitter to receive an email every time someone stops following his updates on Twitter. Twitter is a service that allows users to share short updates about what they are doing in real time with other Twitter users who choose to "follow" them.

Through Qwitter, Mr. Dagan learned that three of the nearly 400 people in his network stopped following him after he sent out an update on Election Night. The update quoted another Twitter user's remark that it would be a miracle if Republican presidential candidate John McCain were to win. "What have I done to offend them?" he recalls thinking.

People who have been unfriended on other sites find out the truth in different ways. Either they notice that their overall friend tally has gone down, or the site's recommendation function "suggests" they become friends with a person who deleted them.

Ron Samuelson, 36, is still smarting after being unfriended a month ago. The chief executive of jewelry retailer Samuelson's Diamonds Inc. in Baltimore, Md., tried to view the profile of one of his Facebook friends -- only to find his access was limited because they weren't friends anymore.

Insulted, Mr. Samuelson wondered if his supposed friend, also a jeweler, feared his profile would give away competitive information, or if he had done it by accident.

It wasn't long before the missing friend resurfaced, this time requesting to join a private Facebook group Mr. Samuelson had created for jewelers to network with each other. Still hurt, Mr. Samuelson says he hesitated before approving his request, but ultimately "chose to take the high road." He says he would never get in the habit of unfriending people himself. "Diplomatically, it's probably not the right thing to do," says Mr. Samuelson, who has 466 friends on Facebook.

Mr. Samuelson declined to name the fellow jeweler. "I don't want to burn any bridges," he says. "He may be a future business contact." ..News Source.. by JESSICA E. VASCELLARO