I just lost a friend.
That seems a very dramatic way to start a blog article, but there it is.
Nobody died, and to the best of my knowledge in the past two days I have neither fought with nor grown apart from anyone I know... and yet there it is, I lost a friend.
I have never been one to count friends... I know who my friends are, and they are all important to me. There are of course different castes of friends, ranging from true friend to casual friend, acquaintance, business associate, and so on. Blended in are the friends I speak to every day versus the ones I speak to occasionally, and neither should assume where they sit in the hierarchy based on that... I have true friends that I have not spoken to in months, and casual friends I speak with almost daily.
The thing is, on Facebook there is no differentiation, which is fine because you have your friends, and they have theirs. It is a great social networking tool that has exploded out of nowhere in the past couple of years, and despite what some may think it is not just for teenagers.
Yesterday (or the day before... I'm not sure) I noticed that my Friends list on Facebook had tipped the scale at 200. To be clear, many of those are people I have not spoken to in years, or know through a friend, or casually from work or a cafe. There are a number of people who added me and whose names ring a bell but I have no idea who they are. It doesn't matter, the number was 200... and since I have never been in any contest about this I did not really care and I did not point it out to anyone.
However I did find it strange that today I only have 199 friends.
Looking at the records it does not say if anyone deleted me, and although that is possible I would not know if there was a notification or not.
I do know of at least three friends who in the past have deleted their Facebook profiles, and I assume that would diminish that number. But you would think there would be an engine to notify you... 'John John has deleted their profile... nothing personal!' But alas, nothing.
I wonder if anyone has ever considered putting together a Facebook Obituaries Page... people whose profiles have for whatever reason been removed. It might be an interesting project for someone with more free time on their hands than me. Fortunately for you I only have time to muse about it... on my blog.