The great Facebook purge of 2007

My random thoughts:

• the one downside of not having my life heavily segmented is that if something is bothering me that I don’t really want 50 people to know about, I’m not sure who I can confide in.  The nature of discretion is complex.  People can’t assure you they’re ‘discrete’, you have to learn by process of elimination.  After you’ve known someone a year, sometimes they tell you something about someone else prefaced with "I shouldn’t tell you this but….".  At that moment you cross them off the list of people eligible to keep your secrets.  After a while you learn that one rare person that you know is a vault.  Note that I’m not even sure I survive that standard, but occasionally such people are helpful.
• I just purged 40 friends from my Facebook profile.  I stopped looking at all the friends status page because it was filled with people I kind of half knew, kind of didn’t.  And lots of people I’m not likely to see again.  I decided to make LinkedIn my professional social network since it’s better at that anyway, and Facebook my really close circle of friends that I’m likely to see often.  I purged a lot of people I used to work with in DC, not because I don’t like them, but because I can no longer care about the fact that they’re watching the premier of "House" on Fox tonight.  If you’re in SF and you’re doing that, well that’s information that’s actually relevant to how I might spend my night.