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"David Spark (@dspark) is a veteran tech journalist and the founder of Spark Media Solutions, a storytelling production company.\nDe-friending has always been awkward. Social networks offer one click \"remove a friend\" options, but it still doesn't make the decision any easier.\nWhat follows is a collection of stories about de-friending. In summary, what I discovered is that everyone approaches their social network differently and it's impossible to communicate all those nuances when you choose to de-friend. \nAs you read, keep in mind that these are all one-sided stories. The interviewees made their best guess as to why the de-friending happened or how the offending party felt after being de-friended. I purposely didn't include stories of de-friending romantic exes because those de-friendings are obvious. If you see a real name and in some cases a link to their profile page, I received permission to publish. In all other cases where people wished to remain anonymous, I replaced their name with the first name of one of my ex-girlfriends or one of my wife's ex-boyfriends.\n1. Squashing opportunists trying to grow their network\nAndrew Bouchard is a member of the Nashville swing dance scene and it's reflected among his Facebook friends. One day a request came from Jane Dubuffet (not real name), who happened to be friends with five other of his swing dance friends. He couldn't remember her, but friended her anyway. \nSoon after, Andrew received an invitation to join the group \"Who is Jane Dubuffet?\" Having all fallen for Jane's friendship requests, the group of 50 members quickly discovered that this mystery woman had infiltrated the Nashville swing dance scene just to grow her business network. Unimpressed, Andrew decided to scratch Jane off his dance card.\n2. Getting laid off can be embarrassing, especially if you were bragging about your job\nLiz's college friend Dave wouldn't shut up about his new high powered consulting job. After a few quick promotions that inflated his head, the bubble burst. Dave got laid off. Ashamed, he quickly closed up his social network so certain people, like his ex-girlfriend, wouldn't find out and take pleasure in his misfortune. So he began de-friending all those connected to his ex, like Liz, who worked with his ex.\n3. Parents can be embarrassing exhibitionists\nOn Facebook, Lauren leaves outrageous status updates about her mock drug use. Her mother, new to Facebook, wasn't in on the joke. After seeing an update announcing that Lauren's superpowers might be tempered by PCP, her mother responded and laid into her. In turn, Lauren looked at her mother's profile and saw that her mom posted a photo of herself in the pool, nude! While Lauren couldn't actually see any of the naughty bits, it was obvious to Lauren that her mother was nude. Lauren called her mom on it, de-friended her, and ever since their relationship has been strained.\n4. Take a hint. I don't want you in my show\nCoordinating an arts management program, Aaron accepts friend requests from more artists than he puts in his shows. While Aaron accepted Dustin's MySpace friend request, he let him know that he wasn't good enough to be in one of his art shows. Retaliating, Dustin began leaving nasty messages on Aaron's blog and MySpace profile. Aaron de-friended Dustin on MySpace and Facebook only to discover that even if they weren't friends, Dustin could still leave nasty personal messages through his Facebook profile.\n5. Guilted back into re-friending\nDenise V.'s kickball teammate had a little too much to drink one night after a game. His obnoxious behavior really got to her. She had enough. Not wanting to see his updates anymore, Denise de-friended him to which he quickly responded, \"Whoops, I may have de-friended you accidentally when I was removing some coworkers. Or else you de-friended me on purpose because you are a hater...\" Caught, Denise felt obliged to re-friend him because they have so many mutual friends and they see each other once a week. Having told her friends the story, Denise is often jokingly referred to as the \"hater.\"\n6. De-friending can regress mature women into a high school gossip mob\nJill received a message from her friend Megan asking, \"When are we getting together? Miss you.\" Moments after that message, Jill discovered that Megan had de-friended her on Facebook. That was odd. She gets a \"let's get together\" message, the two of them hang out twice a week, and they have lots of mutual friends. All signs that made Jill believe she was Megan's friend. Jill didn't realize that Megan was on a rampage, a three day de-friending bloodbath, cleaning out her Facebook friends list. \nThe behavior was so strange that all the mature 30-something women who were in Megan's original friend pool turned into gossiping teenagers. Why did some of them make the cut and others didn't? Turns out some friends who stayed on were told by Megan that they were being left on because they could be valuable to Megan's professional network. One friend was told that she was kept on because Megan thought if she de-friended her, which apparently she wanted to do, she would lose her social standing in the group.\n7. I really love the Minnesota Vikings, and I don't care if that ends our friendship\nOn Sundays, David Erickson goes into full \"I love the Vikings\" Twitter mode with his MST3K-like running commentary throughout the game. Most people follow him for his marketing advice, but often get fed up once a week on Sundays. David doesn't get upset that people stop following him. He knows it's not personal. He just really loves the Vikings.\n8. Don't leave or we'll all de-friend you\nSteven Ortley gave his 2-week notice to his small 35 person PR firm. He was going to leave for a larger competitor, Weber Shandwick. The move came off as a personal insult to his coworkers. As he walked out the door, 18 of his former coworkers immediately de-friended him on LinkedIn. He hasn't spoken to any of them since, but expects he will since he's in such a small community. Until then, Steven prepares himself for the inevitable by having awkward conversations about his 401K transfer with his former office manager.\n9. Don't use my personal life as leverage in business negotiations\nDoug Cone works hard and plays hard. After getting a little behind on a project, Doug's colleague took advantage of their social networking friendship at work by using Doug's posted Facebook photos of his weekend rafting adventures. In team meetings, his jealous colleague would complain, \"...and you are sending pictures having fun in rivers with a bunch of girls.\" Now de-friended, the colleague doesn't seem so distracted by Doug's weekend adventures.\n10. I'm ok with your race and religion, but not your political beliefs \nI was not surprised to hear that many people de-friended during the political season. Here's a quick roundup of the offending issues that pushed people to pull the de-friend trigger:\n\n- An argument about abortion rights ended with Jay Ferrari being called a baby killer.\n- A good friend of Allison Nazarian called the candidate he didn't like a \"Nazi.\" After the de-friending and a discussion, Allison re-friended him, but they don't discuss politics online anymore.\n- Marsha became scared of one friend who announced on his status updates that he hoped all the candidates died in a plane crash.\n- Marianne had enough of her friend's political propaganda harassment. Unfortunately, de-friending didn't stop the harassment as it continued on email where she had to block him.\n- Claire Kiefer had to pull the plug on a friend who announced, \"I don't really HATE Mexicans, but I am sick of all the immigration rallies\" and another who photoshopped an Obama campaign sign with an Islamic flag in the \"O.\"\n\n11. Trying to de-friend your best friend's ex-girlfriend\nChris de-friended his best friend's girlfriend during their breakup. Even though the de-friending was unprompted, Chris got roped in with the ex-girlfriend complaining, \"How can you say, 'Let's be friends' and then ask Chris to de-friend me on Facebook!\"\n12. Keep your online flirting to one woman at a time\nMichelle Reynolds began cautiously dating David, a guy she met on MySpace. While they were dating Michelle noticed that David was also sending flirtatious messages to some other random woman online. The pick up lines were identical to the ones David had been using on Michelle. He said things like, \"Thinking about you,\" \"Let's get together,\" and \"When can I see you?\" \nWhile in full blown multi-flirt mode, David began telling Michelle he wanted a relationship. In addition, Michelle saw David send a message to the other woman announcing he was going to take the next plane out to see her. Having seen enough, Michelle finally confronted him, and David began begging and defending himself, \"Gimme another chance...I flirt with all my friends like this...I have no interest in that woman at ALL...\" Michelle didn't believe him so she deleted him. \nThree weeks later Michelle looked at David's MySpace page and the other woman's. Turns out they both had publicly professed their undying love to each other and had moved in together.\nI'm sure you've been de-friended or had to de-friend someone. It's always uncomfortable. Please share your story. I'm sure we can all learn from your misfortune. For more insight, please check out \"When technology tells us we have no friends,\" and \"The awkwardness of de-friending.\"\nDavid Spark (@dspark) is a veteran tech journalist and the founder of Spark Media Solutions, a storytelling production company. More importantly, he has lots of great friends. Read more of Spark at his blog Spark Minute or listen and subscribe to his \"Be the Voice\" blog and podcast.\nImagery courtesy of iStockPhoto, swilmor, dolgachov, 7nuit  "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2008/11/25/social-network-defriending/>