'Defriending': Tricky

It's a lot easier to friend than to defriend, young people are finding out (see this item for the friending part). A lot of people are nervously making it up as they go along because, as a 27-year-old social networker told the Boston Globe, online society really hasn't developed social norms yet for adding people to, positioning them on, and deleting them from friends lists, and the social sites aren't offering etiquette advice. Friendster.com, one of the oldest social sites, is sometimes also called "Acquaintancer" and "Dumpster" by users, the Globe reports. One user has 126 people on her friends list and doesn't entirely know if she knows them all. "Her Friendster account is part of a group called 'Somerville'," according to the Globe, "meaning that anyone in that group profile is connected to her as a 'friend' and has access to her page. [She] - who uses Friendster to keep track of former roommates, neighbors, and childhood friends who are no longer in her daily life - is thinking of sending a news bulletin on Friendster to let her contacts know she's going to clean up her friends list and explain why."