You have been de-friended.

A really scary thing happened the other day. My roommate came home, and she told me she had gotten annoyed with Facebook, and how some really random people were her friends. She went on a Facebook cleansing, and deleted a dozen people that she really didn't know that well.

So knowing that I knew all of my FB friends, and that this was going to be a very short cleansing exercise, I sat down and went through the list. Of this list of all of my FBBFFs (Facebook Best Friends Forever) I ended up deleting 38 people from my friend list. Granted I had multiple friends in common with all of them, but once I clicked their profile picture, I was looking at a complete stranger. There were a few that were friends of friends of friends that I had met long ago and OF COURSE we friended each other afterwards because a fun night out once means you should be FB friends. Others were people that were friends with people on FB that I knew, so of course they couldn't be too bad.

One was really scary though. When I clicked on my "friend"'s profile, it was this guy who I had never seen in my life. I had 13 friends in common with him, all pretty females, and ALL of his friends on FB were females my age. I think we call that a creeper... It was incredibly disturbing. At some point I had friended this guy thinking that no harm could come from it, and that since he was friends with my friends he couldn't be too bad. Come to find out, now my friends were adding him because they saw he was friends with me and accepted his friend request. So THIS is what my mom was telling me about Internet predators for! I thought about this, and how for some people, Facebook friend numbers really were a bragging right. Not accepting a friend request could mean you (gasp) fall behind!

Bottom line: Go through your online social media "friend" list, and make sure these people have some real connection with you. Is it worth having 1,245 friends when 58 of them are sexual predators preying on you and your friends? Not really. I think you will be surprised how many people you really don't know from Adam. Do you really want complete strangers knowing your life details? Well, after my Facebook cleansing, I know who is keeping up with me...