Unfriending online “friends” is emerging as the latest offense in the world of social networking. Sites such as Facebook and MySpace allow people to build personal profiles with photos, videos and up-to-the-minute updates about their lives, then to share them with select users, or “friends.” The process has even turned the word “friend” into a verb, as in, “so-and-so just friended me on Facebook.” Users agonize over whom to friend (your mom? your ex-boyfriend? your boss?), and worry about whether their friend requests will be accepted or ignored, lingering in cyberspace in what some dub “friend purgatory.”

Now, people who have accumulated hundreds, or in some cases more than a thousand, friends are cutting loose some of the ones they have lost touch with or who were little more than acquaintances from the start. It’s a shift from the days when users, eager to boast about their online popularity, added new friends with abandon, whether or not they really knew them.
…
Most sites allow you to remove friends with a click or two, but they don’t notify people when they’ve been dropped. Sites say that’s a decision designed to mitigate any awkwardness and to respect users’ privacy. A Facebook spokesman says the Palo Alto, Calif., company isn’t concerned with the impact of unfriending and it prefers to “leave the delicate etiquette of defining online social norms” to its users.

Source: Wall Street Journal