Most people tend to ask another person when they interact for the first time on the internet whether or not they have a Facebook account and if yes, they would like to stay connected through the social network. Although most people later then never even bother to send a single message or even Like status update or a picture that you have shared, once they have added you as a contact. It seems as though they just wanted to add you as a friend on Facebook so that they would boast about how many number of friends they know on Facebook.
However, a recent interesting study from Pew has shown that the trend of defriending people on Facebook is on the rise, as reported by Read Write Web. Most people have seemed to have gotten tired of running this race of increasing their number of contacts on Facebook. Now, Facebookers are becoming more reasonable about whom they should befriend online, and this means not everyone certainly. It seems like they are undoing most of the things they have been involved in on the social network by untagging themselves from photos, deleting comments and unfriending fellow social networkers.
According to the statistics collected by Pew, around 67% of the women and 58% of the men are involved in purging their Facebook accounts of such old data. What could have triggered such a chance in their approach? Is it the new timeline that is compelling them to start anew in some ways also? The other reason as to why they have been doing this is the recent cause of concern of internet privacy and the news about social networking sites mismanaging users’ data. Now that the craze of being on the world’s largest social network has settled down, Facebook users are behaving more maturing into not just letting everything in on their profiles for the sake of it. The social networking profiles have now taken a personality and public relations management role, with the profiles showing what you are as a person.
For this reason, users don’t want to give a wrong impression and they have been cleaning it up mostly. Now that it has become an established part of the digital lives of users, they have been busy shaping it all up just as they groom their own personality presentation. According to the survey, 58% of the people have set their profiles to friends-only, 19% have made it viewable to friends of friends and only 20% feel comfortable in leaving it open for all.
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