Earlier in the semester I wrote an article about Facebook and it generated quite a bit of buzz. I tried (unsuccessfully) to ween myself off of Facebook.  It lasted for about a month, and then I felt left out and went crawling back.

I still have a lot of the same issues with the website, but I'm learning to deal with it; however, the one thing that still annoys me is the random "friending."

How am I supposed to deal with the random friend requests?  That girl from high school that I never spoke to--ever.  Why am I her friend?  More importantly, why did she add me?  I don't want to read her status updates or see photos of her drunk at the Rutgers homecoming game.

This brings me to my current predicament.  It's not that it is really a big deal, but at the same time, I like to maintain a degree of order.  It's like a messy desktop.  Why keep the link to the free trial of MSN that comes installed on a new computer? 

Would it be fair of me to compare these people to "junk?"  Yes.

Here is a real life example using an anonymous poster: "John Smith is cat people."  I'm baffled.  The statement, if you could call it that, is from one of the randoms. 

With the context set, what is the policy on deleting friends?  I've done it plenty of times, because I'm sick of knowing about the person, but it has come back to bite me in real life encounters when said party confronts me about the end of our virtual friendship.

What do you say to that?  "Uh, because I don't uhhh, I just thought that it was appropriate.  You know the whole lack of friendship in reality is kind of a factor."

So I present you with this problem.  What to do.  I most likely am going to do a friend purge because I'm anal like that, but how do I deal with it when it interferes with reality?