I just read this news article about Jimmy Kimmel declaring today a National Unfriend Day, essentially asking us to unfriend those people on our facebook lists that aren’t real friends.

I feel like I have to stand up and say something here. Partly because I get to shamelessly plug my Facebook profile and invite you to add me as your friend, and partly because it’s such a benign issue that I feel safe in showing the strongly opinionated facet of my character.

At the time of this writing, I have four hundred and fourteen friends. That’s a stupidly high figure and it always makes me laugh to see the friend count climb. If anyone had that many friends, life would be one huge, relentless party.

And make no mistake. I used the word “relentless”. I could have used a word like “continuous”, but that sounds like fun.

“Relentless” sounds like hell.

But obviously, none of us can claim to have that many actual friends. Of course not! In fact, thanks to Facebook’s continuously (or relentlessly, depending on your perspective) updated functions, I’ve found myself needing to categorize a large portion of my “friends” into smaller groups.

The reason for this was initially very simple: I needed to be able to quickly see who was currently online in the chat window.

My personal record of online Facebook friends is currently at 46. That’s a lot of online people to chat to… And I don’t usually wanna talk to any of them.

Eventually, it became about organizing them in such a way as to be able to figure who I wanted or needed to talk to, just by glancing at my list.

If I need a heart to heart or just feel like chit chatting a little, I look to my A+ friends. I called them that because Facebook lists everything alphabetically, and nothing beats an A+, so they’re always at the top of my list of online friends.

Oh and because they’re real friends. I have sixteen of those in that group… SIXTEEN. Out of more than four hundred! And out of those sixteen, I’m very close to only six of them.

So I have six real, close friends out of four hundred and fourteen. Definitely sobering.

But if I need crew for an upcoming shoot, I have a Photography & Crew category. If I need to reach a model with a concept idea, I have a category for that. If I need to talk to one of my past or future clients, I have a category for that too.

And now we’re getting to the heart of the issue.

Because now Facebook sounds a lot like a networking tool. You have a few real friends, and the rest is whatever you want them to be.

So where’s the problem? In the article, Kimmel mentions Facebook cheapening friendship in its real sense… Sounds really stupid to me. If Facebook calling it “friends” is the issue, then this is a terminology issue. Would he feel better if we called them buddies instead?

“Hey when you get home, buddy me on Facebook” or “Why did you un-buddy me on Facebook ya jerk?!”

I understand and even agree to some extent with Kimmel’s rationale for this. That Facebook’s probably haphazard choice of calling everyone a “friend” is likely to give people a false sense of kinship when there isn’t one to begin with.

But as long as I can mentally separate Facebook’s definition of a friend from the REAL definition of one, I have no problem having over four hundred of them.

So uh… Add me on Facebook