Over the past month I’ve been systematically cleaning up my social graph. It took me a while to figure out how I wanted to do this, as I’m a very active user of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, and Google+ along with a bunch of applications that leverage these various social graphs. Historically, I’ve been a very promiscuous friender, accepting almost all friend requests.

While this strategy worked fine for me for Twitter (since I didn’t have to do anything, and could deliberately choose who I wanted to follow) this didn’t work for any of the other services. Specifically, Facebook had become basically useless to me, LinkedIn’s activity feed was pointless, Foursquare scared me a little, and Google+ was just a cluttered mess.

As I used each of these services daily, I thought hard about how I was using them and what I was doing. I realized that I was using Twitter ideally and no changes were needed. I broadcast regularly through Twitter, which connects to Facebook and broadcasts there as well. I consume content in a stream throughout the day from about 600 people who I follow. I unfollow someone periodically and add someone new periodically. The tempo works fine and I have my Twitter activity feed up on my Mac all day long.

Facebook was more perplexing to me. Ultimately I decided to orient around my activity feed and started unfriending anyone who I didn’t want to see in my activity feed. Given the current Facebook infrastructure, these folks will still “subscribe” to me (same as Twitter follow) and anyone who wants to subscribe to me can. Unfortunately, the UX for unfriending someone Facebook is horrible, so it’s a tedious and long process. I’ve decided to unfriend 10 people a day which means I’ll be done in about 200 days. I realize that once I’ve got this done I need to adjust my security settings to reflect what I actually want to share. That’ll happen at some point.

LinkedIn was easy – I just decided to ignore the activity stream. I’m remaining promiscuous at LinkedIn with two exceptions – no recruiters and no totally random people. LinkedIn continues to be the best way for me to discover professional connections to people I want to reach and the wider the network, the better.

Foursquare was the hardest to figure out. I rebroadcast Foursquare to Facebook and had a very uncomfortable experience this summer with someone pretending to stalk me on Foursquare. While it was a prank, I never found out who did it which caused me to quit Foursquare for a few months. I get too much value out of Foursquare as a historical record (I love 4sqand7yearsago) so I’ve just decided to aggressively unfriend anyone who I’m not close to. Once I get this done, Facebook done, and my security settings right, I’ll be in a happy place.

Google+ is more dynamic right now as I figure out how I really want to use it. I’m finding the integration into Gmail to be very interesting and I expect my use case will change as they roll out more features, like they did today. For now, I’m using it much more like Twitter.

As I’ve been cleaning this up, I realized that I have a bunch of awesome friends. When I look at my friends lists in apps like RunKeeper and Fitbit, I smile a big smile about who I’m connected to. Most importantly, I realize that all of this technology is enhancing my relationships, and it reminds me to be deliberate about how I use it.