Being sick and finding nothing better to do than think about the continued degradation of privacy of the web, I decided to do a (digital) social cleanse.

There was no way I was actually "friends" with 300+ people on Facebook. I started de-friending people - it took me a bunch of passes (each getting progressively more aggressive in terms of what a "friend" meant), but I finally got my list down to 169 friends.

Each pass was interesting; at first I had rules about keeping coworkers (which was quickly abandoned). Then I had rules about people "I'd like to keep in touch with" but oddly, never have had to in the past four years (these were mostly high school friends). Those went. I started actively purging anybody with 400+ friends (if you have 400+ friends and are still a FB friend, then I really like you). Purge, purge, purge.

At the end of it, who did I keep? I kept anybody who could call me at 11pm and ask me for a pick-up from the airport and I wouldn't hesitate to do so. Seems like a pretty simple rule to use.

So that's that.

(I also did a Twitter digital cleanse, but that one was much easier.)