As commenters Wayne Smallman and Heidi Cool have noted here and here, social networks can quickly get out of hand if you track individuals that are too different, too random, or too noisy. However, reducing a list of over 800 people can be a pretty daunting process unless you utilize some rules of thumb to help you along the way.
With this in mind, I present to you the first in a series of brief articles, each covering a sample heuristic you may wish to use to prune your social networks to a more manageable size.
Pruning Heuristic #1: Full Names Only
Here’s an easy idea to lose a few pounds on your favorite social networks. Stop following anyone who doesn’t provide their full name on the service of interest. Although degree of preferred privacy varies on a per-network basis, an individual who makes their full name available is exhibiting more trust, responsibility, and openness than one who doesn’t.
Use this to shorten your follow list. Of course, a user’s handle on a certain service will rarely be his or her full name, but more often than not, a little bit of sleuthing through other public profiles will reveal one’s full identity. My Twitter username is ‘kadesoto,’ for instance, but you can find my full name in my Twitter profile, not to mention other sites and services I have linked to that account.
Limiting your attention to those that you know by name has a more basic practicality to it, too: it’s simply more likely that you are connected to a greater degree to a social networking friend you know the name of rather than one you don’t. A stronger connection generally predicts a stronger interest in this friend’s activities.
(Of course, this heuristic is not to suggest that individuals concerned with privacy are unreasonable to do so.)
Apply this rule to your most bloated social network today and see what happens! Your Socialthing! feed’s ‘rename’ feature will thank you for it.
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I’ve never really thought about the name thing. I guess most of my friends display a full name, but I’m guessing many do not. I suppose that could be a factor when someone is on the tipping point of being kept or removed.
On Pownce I find a handy way to check someone’s activity is to add with_friends after their name, i.e. on page it would be http://pownce.com/cool/with_friends/. If you go through 3 pages and see nothing but short posts they’ve made themselves (probably cross posts with other services) and no replies or interaction, then they’re probably safe to remove. On the other hand if some of their posts are interesting, you may want to add them on Twitter if they seem to be replying there. I’ve done that with a few people. This way they don’t go off the radar entirely but they don’t clog up Pownce.