I Declared Facebook Bankruptcy

Posted by Ray in Social Media on Jun 27th, 2010 | 0 comments

Facebook is by far the largest social site on the Internet. I’ve been on it since before it was opened to the general public and for the most part enjoyed my Facebook experience.

I’ve done a lot of things on Facebook. I’ve tested new features before they’ve come out, I’ve had great chats with the engineering team at Facebook, taken part in a Facebook Hackathon, watched many Developer Garages and even created a company that made social games and applications that was later flipped.

All of these things have been great. They created an interesting problem for me however.

I reached the friends limit last year. 5,000 friends.

My solution at the time was to create a fan page. It sucked though because I didn’t want to ask my friends to become my fans. I didn’t have much of a choice at the time though.

I wanted to communicate new stuff, build lasting relationships and talk with everyone that I had talked with in the past. I realized eventually that a fan page wouldn’t let me keep connecting with the smaller social circle and the larger social circle I had at the same time effectively.

I eventually deleted the fan page. Then I went through and deleted a lot of people from my Facebook account. I didn’t want to offend anyone and I hated to do it but things were out of control.

Flash forward a few months and the same thing began to happen all over again. Facebook started getting out of control. This time for different reasons though.

My news feed was filling up with applications that I didn’t care about (I was hiding everything as fast as I could), the experience was going down hill for me and I felt my self spending less time on Facebook and in some cases starting to lose touch with some of my closer friends and business contacts.

My inbox was full with messages on Facebook, my wall full of comments, my news feed filled with spam. So I created a new account and deleted the old one.

A very drastic measure by any standard but one I felt necessary. This time I’m only adding the people who are close business contacts or close personal friends. If someone searches me down and re-adds me I will do so for a while but for the most part I am treating my Facebook experience more like I would treat my LinkedIn experience and keeping my social circle smaller.

It has drawbacks such as the social graph not being quite as powerful for me on other social sites but for the most part over the course of the last week I’ve kept my friend count below a hundred and overall been much happier with my Facebook experience.

I know I’ve missed some great people, I know I’ve missed some great business contacts this way and I know that is a problem but I’ve been trying to re-find them or re-add them as I can but overall again I’m very happy with what I’ve done.

I’ve declared email bankruptcy many times in the past but this has to be the first and only time I’ve ever declared Facebook bankruptcy.