Facebook Friends

This week I deleted quite a few people I never would have thought I'd delete, including a few extended family members. I have to admit, my friends list is still 184 people. 184?? Really? And that is considered too few by facebook standards. It keeps asking me if I need help finding friends. Seriously?? 184 isn't enough for you? I see people with 400, 600, or more "friends". Does it make people feel good to see a large number associated with the word friend? It is not possible to be friends with 400 people! You have 300 acquaintances and maybe 100 friends, even that seems too high of a number. I am not interested in being friends with that person I met once at med fair and I made the mistake of sharing my real name or the cashier at the local store that always keeps me in her line talking for way too long when people are waiting.

So what makes up 184 friends??

Know It Alls
There are a few "friends" of mine that post good information that I am happy to read. Those are mostly friends I have never met that we came to know each other over the internet because we share some ideal or hobby in common. These people have been a wealth of information for me. I am glad I made that decision a while back that it was okay to friend people I had never met. I am a better person for simply knowing of these people.

Family
I still remember the day my first relative "friended" me. "AHH!! This is for college kids WTH are you doing on here?? OMG. Can they see everything I ever posted??" Followed by an entire day of constant scrolling to look at everything I ever posted and deleting things..... lots of things.......

One Liners
Most of my friends fall under this category. Almost all the people I went to school with as a kid fall under this category. After all I was a theater person so it's understandable that most of them have a great sense of humor. You don't know when they will post, but when they do you know that you'll be rolling. How could you deprive yourself of such personalized hilarity?

Oddities
The people you've known at any point in your life that you feel like you are looking at them through the glass. People who you find puzzling or curious and you just like the idea of keeping tabs on them. What ARE they doing now? I have only a handful that fall under this category. I mostly have their posts hidden because they post some STRANGE things, but I like to be able to look in on them from time to time.

I Wish We Were Friends
Not the facebook definition of friends, but REAL friends. People I have known at different points in life that I would no longer consider myself to be friends with. I knew them at one point, many of them I would have considered a friend at some point. People I wish life would allow me time for.

Hobbyists
For me this is my cycling and triathlon buddies. I miss them badly and I live vicariously through them when they post their races and workouts :p

Friends
The handful of people I still speak to with any regularity, honestly there's not more than 10 people in this category.

Who didn't make the cut?

Remember Whens
These are people my first inclination is to delete, but I have a sentimental attachment to them. Some may only post once a year, but I still don't want to "unfriend" them because pulling up their profile once a year reminds me of good times we used to have. They are on the chopping block. I have not deleted all of them yet. I am a sucker for nostalgia.

School Mates
I used to enjoy reading about activities the people I grew up with knew were going on. Most of them have kids about my children's ages so I would find out about different events geared for kids. Now most of them have sent their kids off to school. Now they post about their kids' classes or other school things, lunch dates, crazy hair days, or dress up days. Eh, not that interesting to me. The events they post are school events. Now that the child is in school there's no reason to do anything outside of that realm. No more museum events, no more businesses getting together for a kid's day, all the extras suddenly became unnecessary I guess.

Haters
I didn't notice this trend until the election propaganda started popping up a few months ago. My "friends" were posting tons of hateful things in either direction. I have to admit I lean one way, I am not truly in the middle, but I feel no need to post metaphors for killing those I disagree with or information that is blatantly false just to get people angry. It made me realize that other than kids I had nothing in common with quite a few of the people I claimed to be friends with. We may have gone to the same school and grown up together, but I would probably not be friends with them if we were to meet for the first time today.

Fakes
There were a few people I was friends with at one point or another and I knew good and well that the relationship had gone south. Distancing happened and yet there they sat on facebook reminding me that neither of us had the balls to admit we didn't really care for one another.


What category would you add? I have a jumble of other people, but I couldn't come up with a good title to throw many of them under.