Facebook has added a lot of new features to their site over the past 6 months. One of these features is the ability to select “close friends“. This was supposed to be an improvement on the old style of lists FB use to offer. However, this feature became annoying before it became anything else.
The new listing feature s cumbersome at best. I find that where I once used lists, though I know I was one of the 5%’ers that did, I no longer do. Adding friends to lists is not as easy as it once was, unless it is a close friend. For them you just need to click the star on their profile and wahlah! You are done!
Sounds great doesn’t it. Well, it is not. After adding some people to my close friends list, I started noticing that my notifications were filled with their posts. In fact, it was so filled with their posts, I couldn’t find the links to comments people had made to my posts. I was actually losing my notifications to the post notifications of my friends.
I love my friends and I want to know what is going on with them, but isn’t that was the time line is for? Why do I need to get notifications every time they post. I can see where this is handy if you are keeping an eye on a profile. For instance if you are cyber stalking someone like your ex, or doing something more innocent like monitoring your kids online activity. Otherwise, it is annoying and cluttering up my Facebook experience.
There are ways you can turn these off, but that seemed like too much work. So I simply removed all my “close friends”. Now all the notifications I get are when someone has commented on a post or a picture of mine. I actually get to pay attention to the engagement happening on my profile!
So though I have many close friends in real life and on Facebook, I no longer have any official “close friends” on Facebook.