Take a look at Chris Brogan’s post on the emotions involved in removing friends from your Facebook network. Up until now, removing friends has been almost taboo (unless you weren’t careful who’s friend requests you accepted). Burger King saw rapid success from a campaign that incentivized Facebook users to remove friends in return for a free burger. Needless to say, Facebook shut that one down very quickly.
As the system matures, we’re inevitably going to see a lot more of this for a number of reasons. For many, it’ll be a case of; “Sorry friend, Farmville and Mob Wars are getting annoying”. For others, it’ll be a limitation as they reach the 5000 friend limit. For me, I think it’ll be a case of spring cleaning for relevance.
http://www.chrisbrogan.com/the-problems-with-friends-lists/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+chrisbrogandotcom+([chrisbrogan.com])
I regularly delete friends on facebook. I have different lists and some people that want to add me as a friend get the lock down list, they can’t see anything more than if we weren’t friends. I figure they won’t even notice when I delete them anyway.