I've kept my Facebook profile public to everyone, meaning that someone does not need to add me as a friend to browse my bio, status updates, pictures, etc. I've taken this approach because I never joined Facebook in college (truth be told - I pretty much boycotted FB when I was in school, ha!) and therefore I never have used FB to post private "for friends only" content. Facebook has always been (for me) a good place to connect with people that I would otherwise not been able to and visa versa. You can learn A LOT about someone just by clicking around on their Facebook profile. ;)
However, my friend-all/accept-all strategy has opened the door to having A LOT of Facebook "friendships" with people I don't really know.
As of today, I have about 1,900 Facebook friends. Of those friends, approximately 500 of those are people I actually know in real life - either intimately or through business connections - but the remaining 1,40o are people I have never met nor know much about.
And lately, the number of new friend invitations I've been getting is alarming. Who are these people? I understand that Facebook has been growing (especially with people 35-65) so I attribute a lot of new friend requests to newbies that are just trying to make friends, learn what Facebook is all about and start using it to help network themselves in a meaningful way (hopefully).
The problem I am facing is, as my not-so-real friend count grows, my Facebook Wall is looking more and more like a MySpace wall. Random messages like "check out my website" and "omg ur so hot, kasdf;lk" are more common now than not and it is starting to really annoy me.
My solution for now is to just delete those messages from my FB Wall as I get them, so that the important content and messages posted by my real-life friends and myself are not diluted by the rambling nonsense of people I have friended, but who do not really understand how to operate in Facebook.
I also use the "add friend to list" option when accepting a friend request to categorize new friends into buckets - like NYC, High School, Colleague, Twitter, etc - which allows me to limit certain buckets to have less access to particular parts of my profile than others. Perhaps people I don't know I should not be allowed write on my wall. Oh that just kinda makes me sad though.
What should I do? Stop friending people I don't know? Is that the only solution? It might be.
