Today is National Unfriend Day. Which of your chums will you chop?
National Unfriend Day wants you to give your chums the chop. 17 November will henceforth be known as the day we liberate ourselves from the tyranny of Facebook, MySpace and Bebo friends.
Today is National Unfriend Day. 17 November will henceforth be known as the day we liberate ourselves from the tyranny of Facebook, MySpace and Bebo friends.
US chat show host Jimmy Kimmel encourages you to use today to cull those classmates and chop your chums, narrowing your list of online friends down to people you actually care about.
The campaign has won the support of everybody's favourite mountain-conquering starship captain, William Shatner, who told Kimmel, "These people on Facebook, they're not your friends. You want to know who your friends are? Post a status update that says 'I'm moving this weekend and I need help.' The people that respond are your friends. Everyone else isn't."
All the cool kids are limiting their sprawling social-network circle these days. Path is a new network that limits you to just 50 friends so you can share with just the people closest to you.
Even Facebook and Google are getting in on action, segregating messages from close friends away from missives from the riff-raff in its new Facebook Messages and Gmail Priority Inbox. Apple's Ping network is way ahead of the unfriending curve, as nobody's bothered to sign up in the first place.
Facebook doesn't make it easy, though. Previously, you could hit 'Ignore' on an unwanted friend request, and that would be the end of it. Now, however, 'Ignore' has been replaced with 'Not now', which shuffles the request into your sidebar where it mewls at you until you give in.
If you're really serious about slimming down your list of friends, why not sign up to one of our 50 most niche social networks.
Will you be taking a chainsaw to your friends list? Is your list already leaner than Angelina Jolie on a running machine, or do you love being at the heart of a social circle the size of a moon?