The great Facebook unfriending: Ow my feelings!

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, & the social media that fulfill 'em. Biggie size available on Flickr.

Prologue: Today the New Oxford American Dictionary announced “unfriend” is the 2009 Word of the Year. May it not be a portent of things to come.

Gird yourself for a mortifying tale of techno treachery, friends. Girded?

Ok. In my weekly perusal of Facebook friend’s friends to see who I might be missing being friends with (it’s an orgy of friendship up in here), I came across an ex-coworker who I just adore. We’ve been Facebook friends forever, since that first blissful wave of friendings back in the 1980′s. I thought “I shall be sociable and leave him a wall howdy!”, and scrolled through my friend list to find him. How nice of me, spreading wall sunshine. Scroll scroll. Wait. What the heck. He. Wasn’t. There.

Like dropping your laptop in the bathtub (both personally dismaying and electrically imprudent), a cold shock of disbelief rippled through my being. It appeared, I cringed, that I had been UNFRIENDED.

Ouch.

Now, I could have assimilated the sting of rejection and got on with my life had this been your run of the mill Facebook-friend-you-don’t-really-know-but-they-know-your-other-friend-and-you-met-them-once-outside-Starbucks kind of thing, but this was an actual capital-F Friend. Someone I like! Someone whose positivity and energy shines through their status updates like the glint off a unicorn’s horn! What went so very wrong that he couldn’t at least just “hide” me? read more

Design freebie: Twitter bird illustration

Doesn't he just look like he can barely contain his brilliant tweet?

There’s a tweet in there somewhere! If you need a lovely blue bird to illustrate a pithy blog post you’re writing about Twitter, or something, feel free to download a big version of this illustration here.

Social search: conversational clutter?

Our oversocialized friend talking to the cloud about social media search