I've noticed a trending down among my facebook-friends. Yeah I know Facebook is conquering the social media world but I've noticed that the numbers of people's facebook-friends are decreasing. Although there are several who have over or near a thousand facebook-friends, there are many whose numbers are dropping quietly, where once my five hundred facebook-friends seemed small it's now larger than average. While there would be exceptions this maybe be a trend, a tightening. Facebook is revolutionary in that people are not anonymous, they use their real names, their antics and activities easily identifiable. So I think what has happened is that people are realizing this and tightening their social circles accordingly.
I discovered this recently when I starting pruning my facebook-friends and noticed other people's facebook-friend counts. My blog and twitter feed is where I want to discuss and think about things publicly, where someone might go who wanted to know what I thought about a particular event or idea. I don't necessarily want to share all the photos of my wife and daughter with the wider online world or let the world know that there are ants in my house for example. So I've been pruning facebook-friends. Ultimately I'd like my facebook-friends to made up of four categories: extended family (75), local friends (50), interstate and overseas friends (50) and people who I don't want to loose track of (25). Sociologically they say it's difficult to interact with groups larger than about 150 and I like the idea of a smaller tighter non-work related group.
Facebook has made it easier to interact socially in 'groups' and 'pages' without having to be facebook-friends. This is useful for ministry where online social interaction forms apart of people's wider lives.