De-friending on Facebook has always been so much easier than ending a friendship offline because there has been no need to account for your actions – you simply click on the ‘remove friend’ link underneath your contact’s profile photo and hey presto! They’re no longer part of your network, and they’re not even aware of it.
It’s happened to me once or twice where suddenly I’ll wonder what ever happened to someone’s constant status updates appearing on my home page, only to realise upon looking through my friends list that they’ve de-friended me; but by that stage it’s too late to do anything about it because I have no idea when the offence occurred, and let’s face it they’re usually people with whom I don’t really have any real relationship – it’s usually a case of them ‘spring cleaning’ their accounts and de-friending people they don’t know or communicate with.
However, a post on Mashable reports that the days of de-friending without the awkardness could be over with the creation of an add-on by Greasemonkey that will check your network at scheduled intervals to see if anyone has removed you, and then alert you if they have.
Facebook itself does not have this functionality because it believes that users should be able to choose who is in their networks at any given time, but there is a demand for this information – I mean, wouldn’t you want to know when someone decides not to be your ‘friend’ anymore? Granted, you can find this out for yourself, but it’s a tedious task going through a list of at least 100 friends, and also difficult to actually pick out individuals who aren’t there anymore.
So, in the future maybe it would be wise to consider the implications of de-friending on Facebook, because if this application takes off as it has the potential to do, what was once fairly easy to get away with could become a confrontation, especially if you’re not just ‘spring cleaning’, but really trying to get rid of one of your friends!
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