My Total Facebook Makeover

Posted by Fr. Roderick on Nov 18, 2010 in How-to | 5 comments

In this article, I share how Late Night Talk Show host Jimmy Kimmel inspired me to rethink the way I am using Facebook. Discover which drastic steps I took to ‘fix’ Facebook.

US talk show host Jimmy Kimmel recently declared November 17 “National Unfriend Day”. According to Kimmel, Facebook is cheapening the meaning of friendship. Can you really maintain true friendships with hundreds or even thousands of people?

His website stated that “NUD is the international day when all Facebook users shall protect the sacred nature of friendship by cutting out any ‘friend fat’ on their pages occupied by people who are not truly their friends.”

Facebook friends and real friends
Of course, the announcement of this new “national holiday” was more a late night sketch than anything else, but Kimmel does have a point. If you have been on Facebook for a couple of years, you might have accumulated hundreds (some even thousands) of Facebook ‘friends’ that you don’t really know at all.

Facebook itself has stimulated this by suggesting friends based on the social networks of the people that you already accepted as your Facebook friends. Popular social games like FarmVille make the situation even worse, because you someone *has* to be your Facebook friend in order to play the game with you.

Why is this a problem?
Let me list a few reasons:

1. Facebook becomes irrelevant. Your news feed will fill up with updates from people you don’t really know, and with whom you are not likely to interact. Applications based on that newsfeed, like the popular iPad app “Flipboard” lose their relevance if most of the news it aggregates is based on the interests of your FarmVille neighbors with whom you have nothing in common except for some virtual cows and crops.

2. Facebook becomes unmanageable. All these ‘friends’ can send you messages, social gaming requests, page suggestions, group invitations and other digital clutter. Both my Facebook inbox and request list receive hundreds of messages per week. Only a few of them are personal and relevant to me. Cleaning up these lists takes a lot of time every day.

3. Privacy concerns. Facebook has a longstanding abysmal reputation when it comes to protecting your privacy. Commercial parties can get access to a lot of your personal information simply via the people you are connected to. Unless you actively protect all your information (and this is a laborious process you have to do yourself), a lot of your life is out there without you knowing who has access to it. Specialized companies invest heavily in gathering all the information they can find about you and your Facebook friends so they can ‘profile’ you for commercial purposes.

4. You expose yourself to scams and to spam. If you blindly accept any friendship request on Facebook, you might be adding some devious people to your circle of friends. Scammers, spammers and other people that could misuse their access to your personal information. You wouldn’t invite a total stranger that knocks on your door to join you for for a cup of tea, share your private information and show that person all your family photos, right? So why would you do this on Facebook?

5. You lose track of your true friends. if you have gathered hundreds or thousands of Facebook friends, it becomes increasingly difficult to keep track of the people you really know and care about. Their updates will get lost in the ‘flux’ of updates from that big, distant crowd. Sure, Facebook is apparently using some algorithms to weed out some of the clutter in your news stream, and you could create subsets of ‘real’ friends through the creation of lists, but is this really a solution to the information overload generated by too many people in your network?

Drastic steps
I decided to take some drastic steps to redefine the way I use Facebook. Here is what I did:

Step 1: First of all, I decided to move all my public updates to a separate Facebook page that anyone can access and ‘like’. I control the information that is posted there.

Step 2: I created a special username for that page so it is easy to find. In my case, I opted for ‘Facebook.com/Fr.Roderick’

Step 3: I changed my profile username.

Originally, I had chosen ‘Facebook.com/fatherroderick’ as the username for my profile. At the time, I didn’t know how Facebook would evolve. Using the title I also use in my podcasts, “Father Roderick”, made sense.

But now that Facebook has become much more international, the username is not appropriate anymore. For people from Holland, I’m “Pastor Roderick”, for the French “Pere Rodrigue” and for Italians “Don Rodrigo”. Fortunately, Facebook allows you to change your username ONCE. I decided to go with my full name, “Facebook.com/RoderickVonhogen”. I removed the Umlaut from my last name, because almost no one knows how to type that on a computer (let alone how to pronounce it!). Unfortunately, this didn’t ‘free up’ my original username ‘fatherroderick’. To prevent name squatting, Facebook is not releasing this for reuse. Oh well.

Step 4: I posted a message on my profile to tell my Facebook friends to move over to my Facebook page for future updates. I already have more than 2000 people who did this, and even though not everyone will notice this post, I figured I had to let people know where I went.

Step 5: I then started to purge my friends list, keeping only people that I truly know and interact with on a regular basis. A tremendous undertaking with over 4000 friends – it will take me several days to go through the whole list.

Step 6: I also decided to get rid of more clutter by definitively blocking all Facebook games, including the Zynga games that I once played. I have had fun playing those games, but most of my gaming has moved over to the iPad – I just can’t keep track of the hundreds of messages that these social games are generating. My Facebook inbox had become the Death Star’s Garbage Compactor. I want it to be a Zen garden again.

Step 7: Step back and see what happens. It is going to be interesting to see if these steps will make Facebook useable and relevant again. Will it anger the people I ‘unfriended’? Or will they understand? Will my followers move over to my Facebook page, or will I just fade away for them? I will evaluate the results in a later article when the digital dust has settled.

In the mean time, tell me how you use Facebook. Do you recognize my concerns? Do you have a different take on how to effectively interact with people via Facebook? I would love to hear your feedback in the comments!