Facebook faux pas?

At present, I have roughly 450 friends on Facebook. The problem is that plenty of these people are not my friends -- or colleagues, or people I ever expect to see or talk to again. I estimate that between 10-20% of my "friends" fall into this category. This is mostly my fault; I did approve or initiate all of the friend requests. But in the age of Facebook-as-platform, this means 10-20% more worthless application notifications, event invites, and the like.

This brings me to my question; is it polite to delete these connections? Ideally none of these people really know who I am, so they shouldn't notice. But in general, social networks seem to be built in the 'insertions only' model, with friend deletions being a rare occurrence and a design afterthought.

I think I'll just do a purge and see what happens :-).

Finally a shout out, this time to Chris, for another nifty psychology piece in the New York times. Evidently, the whole field of "cognitive dissonance" is based on results from an experiment which are better explained by statistics (in particular, the Monty Hall problem). Owned. I may take a closer look in a full blog post. The third chapter of Influence is coming soon; it's sixty pages and I had to push out two papers this week!