I have decided that I am going to make my facebook page more useful. It seems like everyone has facebook and loves using it. My teammates talk to each other on it all the time even though they already spend about six hours a day together. There’s always some sort of drama over some post or another and I feel like I am missing out.

I’ve actually had a facebook page since it first came out 4 years ago. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of allowing myself to become friends with anyone who asked me. And a lot of people have asked me. I usually see a surge in friend requests after a swim meet, to tell you the truth. Unfortunately, I don’t really know most of them… like 450 of them.

So now I can’t use facebook to keep up with people I actually know – because all of their news is drowned out by the happenings of people who I don’t know. My news feed is clogged with photos of high schoolers in formal wear and videos of age group swim meets. Not that I don’t think that these things are cool. I’d just rather that I knew at least one person involved.

To that end, I am doing spring-cleaning on my “friends.” It’s a dirty job, but, fortunately, I have a system. First, I go to my “friends” with new updates (I figure that these are the people who are on facebook the most, and therefore the most dangerous). Then I scroll down the list, visiting the homepage of each person whose name I can’t recognize and I check on a few basic things:

1. What friends to we have in common? If Katie Hoff, Jessica Hardy, Cullen Jones, Dana Kirk, and Mary Descenza are the 5 friends that we have in common I will delete you. This is the mark of a swim stalker. From my research, it looks like these guys use the same lax friendship policy that I once followed. So, if they are the only friends that we have in common then you probably just friended the entire national team.

2. When is your birthday? If you do not have a birthday year posted or you were born after 1990 you are also in danger of being deleted. Or in other words, if you know who A.C. Slater is, you should be fine.

3. If you don’t have a picture, have a nasty picture, or are part of some unsavory group, you are not my friend. If you are not in college but have a picture where you look like a porn star, I am going to remove you. I can see instances where it would be reasonable for a college kid to “dress up” but otherwise you are either too young or too old and wishing you were the opposite. My friend list will be cougar and jail-bait free!

At this point, it may seem like it’s impossible to stay on my friends list. I mean, who among us, at some point, hasn’t been friends with Dana Kirk, under 18 years old, or dressed like a floozy? But, there are a few ways to survive: If I recognize your picture I won’t delete you (I might have just not caught your name at some point). If you are a Stanford student or alum I won’t delete you. If I think I remember you from some point in my childhood I’m keeping you (mostly for gossip purposes). Of course, the easiest way to make the cut is if I actually know you.

I apologize if I spaced out, got a little trigger happy, and deleted you when we actually do know each other. It is a mind numbing process. Fortunately, it’s not irreversible.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 14th, 2008 at 5:00 am and is filed under tarakirk. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.