Kill your social network

Facebook is ceaseless in its effort to get me to add more friends. Every time I load a profile page, I am exhorted to let Facebook plumb my email to add more people to my network. In this respect, the world's biggest social network has come to resemble a grandmother who constantly pesters you to call your cousins more often or write out thank-you cards.

Here's the problem with that: your online social networks are too big.

Facebook and marketers (like me) want you to have bigger and bigger networks. It makes better ad targeting possible when you have a bigger network, and makes it easier for us to exploit the network effect to our advantage.

But for you, that big social network is just weighing you down. The last time Facebook updated the stats in their press room, the average Facebook user had 130 friends. I'll wager that that number is skewed down by older folks and people who have abandoned their accounts. For the active user, that number must be higher. I've got over 400, myself, but I regularly see people that dwarf that number. It's become de rigeur to accept most friend requests; on Facebook I can hardly bring myself to turn anybody down. Even if I started now, what would the point be? My Facebook friends already include people that:

• I went to junior high school with and never saw again;
• I had one class with in college;
• Were in my unit in the military, but assigned to a different company;
• Colleagues and former colleagues, including bosses and subordinates;
• A guy who sold me some computer components once;
• A couple of friends-of-a-friend, that I don't think I've ever actually met in real life.

As a result, I routinely see people in my Facebook newsfeed that I honestly wouldn't know to say "Hi" to if I saw them on the street.

For me, that enormous diversity of friends completely paralyses me. I'll never post anything on Facebook that's political or contentious, or even something funny but of questionable taste (as it happens, much of the things I find funny are of questionable taste). Sometimes it's for fear of offending someone in my network but often it's simply because, frankly I don't really give a damn about what most of the people in my network think.

When Facebook announced Groups last year, I thought they had finally licked this problem by greatly simplifying the process to create discrete groups that would be granted varying levels of access to your wall. This was not the case. I guess I could sit down and organize all of my friends into lists, but starting from scratch at this point would require the better part of a Saturday.

I could address this paralysis by just having a massive cull, but I don't really feel compelled to. I already have a small social network populated only by close friends where lively discussions of links take place every day: Google Reader.

Reader works because there is only about 30 people in my network - my closest friends - and I have no intention of letting it grow much bigger. Unlike Facebook, I am stone-cold-ruthless in turning down Google Reader sharing requests, and that's what makes Reader great for me. On Reader, I can be as controversial as I like – with none of the social awkwardness that comes from rebuffing friend invitations.

It doesn't matter what the network is (a lot of pundits scoffed at Path's maximum network size of 50, but I found it intriguing) - but to maintain a lot of high-quality discussions and a minimum of drama, it has to be small and very selective. If you do go to a new network you'll have the onerous task of bringing your friends with you, but it will absolutely be worth it.

So, don't worry about me or my fellow marketers. Kill your big social network and find a more rewarding social networking experience.

Fernando Rizo is Head of Digital Media for Ketchum Pleon, is an iPhone game developer in his spare time, and is @fernandorizo on Twitter.