Social Networking, signal to noise ratio

Today I decided to begin the process of clearing the signal I receive across the social networks I belong to. Essentially this involves un-friending, un-following, and deleting of some people in my ‘friend’ lists across Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, FriendFeed, Last.fm, etc. to try and limit the amount of noise in my conversation stream.

I know a lot of people subscribe to the theory that you can never have too many friends on these social networks, and for a long while I was of the same opinion, however lately I’ve come to realise that there is a tipping point where the amount of noise becomes overwhelming and the actual quality conversation gets lost, or at least too hard to manage.

I’m sure there are some naysayers out there who think this is a stupid thing to do. They would probably suggest I use an app like TweetDeck to group the different types of people I follow to make it easy to keep that noise out of the actual conversation stream I want to follow, however to me that is completely pointless and is actually doing them a favour keeping their follower / friend numbers up high, supposedly maintaing their ‘influence’. Typically these people are ‘social media experts’, or ‘social marketing experts’, or possibly just your run of the mill ‘internet marketer’ or ‘SEO expert’. *yawn*

If you’re still on one of my friend lists, congratulations…you actually post things I want to read.