150 Friends

I’ve spoken recently about declaring Facebook Bankruptcy but today I wanted to give everyone an update on how this has worked out for me as well as proposing a new self-imposed 150 friend limit for others.

After the past several weeks of having a greatly decreased number of friends on Facebook I’ve found that I am even more social than before on the site.

Instead of having to sift through upwards of a thousand news post each day in the feed I find that ten minutes of time will allow me to see everything that everyone has posted since the previous day and I can stay better connected to the people I truly care about on Facebook.

I’ve also imposed upon myself a 150 friend limit. I’m currently sitting at 150 friends with a few requests still pending.

If I want to approve some of the new requests then some of the old friends have to go.

I remove friends every once in a while with whom I truly am not communicating with. The people who don’t communicate with me or those that have been away for some time. I find that by removing them and then replacing them with someone new I get some fresh new perspectives as well as new content to look at.

I’m suggesting to anyone with a large number of friends that you simply begin cutting down your list with me.

Tell me below of your commitment to par down your friends list and maintain that limit. You will find your social experience on Facebook to have greatly improved.

New Dorks

Keep The Landing Simple

We’ve decided to take a new approach to the Guild Press Facebook page. New users who haven’t become fans yet will now be presented with the following…

Click To Enlarge

We believe this new call to action with a simple explanation on what we do can really help increase our engagement.

Have any thoughts?

I Declared Facebook Bankruptcy

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.

How Capital One Hunted Me Down and Bashed Me For Complimenting Them

Recently I came to the DEFENSE of Capital One for being on top of security issues on my Facebook profile.

Apparently someone AT Capital One decided it was a great opportunity to bash me though.

So all of the good things I’ve said. Well forget them… do I really want to give my business to a credit card company that decides to come to random Facebook profiles mentioning them and then bashing you and all of your friends who have all said NOTHING bad about them?

I took a few quick screenshots to post here showing the conversation. You be the judge.

I’m so confused as to why a Capital One employee has decided to come attack me on my personal profile?

Update: She is removing the comments but a new one just came in. To further solidify the legitimacy of these here is the text notification from her latest remark:

Feel free to DIGG this post: http://digg.com/business_finance/How_Capital_One_Hunted_Me_Down_Bashed_Me_Over_Compliment