unfriend-ly

It was back in January that Burger King kicked off their whopper sacrifice campaign rallying whopper lovers to drop 10 friends on Facebook for a free burger.

This week the New Oxford American Dictionary named its word of the year as UNFRIEND.

Blimey, who would have thought we would find ourselves with so many friends through our myriad of networks we'd have to start scaling back on them!

Yesterday I noticed on Linkedin that my network update referenced one of my contacts as reaching 300 connections which is known as the Double Dunbar! This refers to Robin Dunbar an anthropologist who proposed that we are only able to maintain a network of 150 connections before things start to break down... you know, you find it too hard to catch up and stay in touch in any meaningful way. So my Linkedin contact has double the amount of people in their network they can 'properly' maintain a relationship with.... Question is what constitutes a maintaining a relationship in a Linkedin context or any context for that matter? How many people in our network are like 'rainy day' contacts... ? Is there a point where we simply need to sacrifice quantity for quality?

Recently I have also been UNFRIENDING myself from the abundance of e-newsletters I seem to have oversubscribed to as well. in an average day, I seem to find myself on the receiving end of somewhere in the vicinity of 30 daily newsletter updates (and that is just on my work email). Assuming I spent an average of 5 minutes having a read of these, that would be 2.5 hours in my day! I know I am not alone here either as just this week I have had this conversation with a few friends who are all claiming the same need - to unsubscribe from their over abundance of emails updates, UNFRIEND the ones that just don't make the cut anymore and reclaim their day.


There has been a lot of discussion from thinkers like Tim Ferris (the 4 hour week) where he has 17 posts on email detox as well as a video of the celebrity tech blogger Robert Scoble talking about how he gets throgh 622 RSS feeds as well as tens of thousands of emails!



Make unfriending your friend!