Facebook for me has become as cluttered as my desk drawer, packed with things I don’t use,  need to find, or just need to clean out.  On Facebook, I have friends I don’t know, have no idea of the context of the relationship, and have probably never interacted with; apps I haven’t used in over a year; and many “fan” pages I liked but can’t remember why.  Whatever your reason, you may want to unfriend some folks.

Cleaning house in Facebook is not as easy as it used to be.  There is no mass unfriending or unliking.  It’s a rather tedious process to go through almost 3000 friends, but here is the easiest way I found to cull the herd (scroll down for a short screencast):

1. Open your Facebook personal page (click your name in the upper right if your account opens to the Home page/news feed).
2. Click Activity Log in upper right, just under the header picture.
3. On the resulting page,  click ALL at the top of the left column, then scroll down that column and click Friends (you may have to use the More button to find the Friends link).
4. That action will bring up a timeline of when you added your friends, you can access and pinpoint months on the timeline bar in the nearer right column.
5. From the list click on the pencil icon to the right of the friend’s name and the drop down with give you the option to highlight the friend in your timeline, hide from your timeline, or unfriend.
6. If you choose the unfriend option, a confirmation window will open.  Just click Remove and that friend is zapped.

If you have been doing Facebook for a while you will probably find that a number of folks you have friended over the years have deactivated their accounts.  I was amazed that almost 20% of the folks on my list were no longer on Facebook (or maybe they just started over).