Are Your Facebook Friends Worth A Dollar?

The other day I was washing the dishes and I was thinking about all the Facebook Friends I have who I rarely interact with: The people I sat across from during senior year Chemistry, the people I did a presentation with for one subject at University, that guy I worked with for six months in a warehouse or that girl who used to date my ex-housemate.

Midway through a dreaded cutlery, I had an interesting thought: What would happen if everyone on Facebook had to pay one dollar once a week for every friend they had. Clearly, it would never work. The e-Public would never allow such a travesty! However, it's interesting food for thought and it got me thinking about who I would pay a dollar to stay connected with. Obviously my family and close friends would come first, important people who I could contact for any questions about work and/or study would come second, but anyone more than that and I probably wouldn't be willing to hand over the cash. I went through my friends list and came up with roughly 50-55 people I would definitely be willing to pay $1.00 to have on my list but that was the extent of it.

So I am happy to pay $55.00 a week. That would cut my fairly conservative list of friends down by about 4/5ths, which actually really surprised me. Why? Because I'm pretty stingy about my Facebook anyway. I don't add people I haven't met and I routinely remove people I haven't spoken with in a long time. Some people might consider that rude, or somehow elitist- but really, if I'm not interested in that persons daily activities and they are not interested in mind, then I'm doing both of us a favour by cutting the connection.

So to discover that even with my specially selected and carefully maintained friend list, that 80% of them aren't worth more than a cheeseburger at happy hour to me, I was rather surprised. Imagine then the accounts of the 'e-social butterfly' with friends in the thousands of whom they have met less then half. Are those people really going to spend thousands of dollars each week for the sake of strangers? Doubtful.

It also brings an interesting question to mind about the quality of posts. If you knew people were paying their hard earned money for your updates, would you put a little more effort into them? Would you consider it well worth their while to pay for photos of your lunch? Or would you start having real opinions? Real observations? A dash of dry humour and wit in your occasional status update?

I know I probably would- after all- you get what you pay for!

So food for thought, comment if you feel inspired!