People unselling themselves in the social marketplace: What it takes to get Facebook unfriended.

Research now shows what we all kind of knew already.

Would you be able to predict what it would be that would cause another person to lose their status as a Facebook "friend"?  How good would you be to say with confidence what causes some people to be cast aside and placed in the landfill of broken Facebook relationships?  

Well, you don't have to wonder any more--a University of Colorado doctoral student has the answer.  In a study of 1,500 Facebook users reported by TIME, Christopher Sibona, PhD student in Computer Science and Information Systems, has isolated the top reasons why some people abandon their "friends" on Facebook.  Surprisingly, they are not all that different from real-life rejection criteria.  

It's annoying anyway no matter where it occurs.

The leading reasons Facebook users "unfriend" somebody:  Making...

[1] Frequent, unimportant posts.  "The 100th post about your favorite band is no longer interesting," reports Sibona in a press release.

[2] Politically polarizing and inappropriate posts on friends' walls, say about religion or politics.  

[3] Crude comments, racial slurs, or offensive statements.  

Wow!  Who knew that these were the things that turned people off in on-line behavior?!!! Come to think of it--they're the same reasons that lead to the decline of relationships in real-life!  

Were the 16% ever really wanted as friends in the first place?  

Speaking of real life, Sibona's research also found that when people get Facebook unfriended, 57% of those queried reported it was for online behavior--you know, the kind of stuff noted previously.  However, twenty-seven percent of Facebook unfriendings stem from offline, real-world activities like how people act in normal life, i.e., being a real-life jerk.  

And what about the remaining 16%?  Well, we'll just have to wait for the full findings to be reported in the Proceedings of the Hawaii National Conference on System Sciences.  I don't really know, but I'm guessing that those unlucky people were never wanted as FB friends in the first place!  

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