I have ZERO Facebook friends!!!
Wednesday, May 19, 2010 at 13:16 | baratunde I did it!! I fucking did it!! I manually deleted all my Facebook friends.
And here's what the home screen looks like when you have ZERO FRIENDS! So clean! I love this. I really, really love this. Facebook is so much more awesome with zero friends.
As some of you know, I made a big stink of my need to reboot my Facebook experience. I feared outright account deletion because of my dependence on Facebook Connect to log in to various apps and sites. Plus I have a lot of tagged photos I wasn't quite ready to leave. Plus, honestly, I have a small amount of pride in my low member number (#2244).
The problem was deleting over 4,500 people would have taken 20 hours, but I found a few greasemonkey scripts that helped. I also figured it would be faster for all my friends to delete me once than for me to delete them 4,500 times, so I asked everyone to unfriend me. Unfortunately, people don't take orders very well on Facebook.
I think maybe 300 people unfriended me. Many more tried but couldn't figure out how. Some even protested and refused to unfriend me, staging some sort of sit-in on my profile! And then today, one of my co-workers put me on to the Edit Friends option under "Account" when you're logged in. I was deleting two friends per second!
I feel like I've been given a new lease on life. I'm Facebook born again!!
By the numbers:
- when I started, I had about 4,700 friends and 1,200 fans of my page
- today I have 0 friends and 1,800 fans of my page
It's a major hit in overall Facebook impact, and it will take time to push people toward the Page, but it's worth it for a more sane experience. I'd really like to thank Aaron Karo, who told me to do this months ago, but I refused, thinking there was a better way. I was wrong.
Now, enjoy this recent South Park episode titled "You Have 0 Friends"
Reader Comments (1)
Hey,
I am a proud zero friend facebook user too! Went through and manually deleted all of them, and everything on there but a couple of photos, just to see how it would work. Turns out that I can't seem to contact anyone on my old friends list via facebook - simply will not let me send a message. Facebook does, however, recall who my friends where - for example if I type any one of their first names in the search engine, the old friend shows up right away, never mind there are only god knows how many "Kathleens" on facebook! I also see there are web sites attached to the account which I've never been to. Anyway, all sort of passing interest to me.