Reevaluating My Facebook Goals

When I first joined Facebook, the idea was to connect to my real life friends — those I see often and those who are far away and easy to be out of touch with. It was wonderful to finally connect again with old schoolmates and friends we’d either moved away from or vice versa.

As time went on, I joined Squidoo and HubPages.  As I was doing this,  my fellow online booksellers were joining Facebook. Soon I began to get friend requests from people I only knew online, and some from names I didn’t recognize at all. This put me in a quandary. I really felt some of my Rocket Moms friends were really friends, even though we had only met online.  But when you friend one lensmaster, you get a lot of requests from other lensmasters you many not know or know as well.

Same with booksellers. I have worked very closely with some booksellers who are part of my booksellers’ cooperative, Tom Folio. Some I have met personally and even been in their homes. Others have names I didn’t recognize when the friend requests started coming because they had lurked on bookseller discussion lists where I used to post frequently. The boundary lines started getting blurry, and I began to accept almost anyone who had something in common enough for me to see a connection.

Sometimes you can't see the trees for the forest.

Then, a few months ago, along came Google Plus. I began to be added to the circles of others and add others to my circles. And I started seeing the same posts on Facebook and Google Plus from the same people. The Facebook wall began to look almost like my Google Plus stream. And,worse, my friends from the non-virtual world began to get lost. They were the trees in the forest I most wanted to see, and their posts were lost in the great forest wall.

What to do? Before I could decide, Facebook changed its face and format, driving many, including me, crazy. Names I’d never seen on my wall before popped up and people I used to see disappeared.  I started reorganizing my lists and putting different friends on different lists. But it makes me tired. So here’s what I’m planning to do about it.

I’m going back to Square One. I’m going to nicely request my Facebook friends I’ve never met personally to connect with me on Google +.  Then, as they connect, I will unfriend them on Facebook. This allows for transition. I will group them neatly into the proper Google Plus circles, and then I should once again be able to see the individual trees in my Facebook forest.

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