Auditing my Facebook friends

An auditor by day and a self-proclaimed IT nerd by night, I sometimes find that the two bleed into each other.  Case in point --- Facebook.  Say what?  I know Internet, stay with me here.

One concept in IT auditing to ensure that people don't have access after being fired or transferring jobs is the periodic access review.  Basically you want to make sure that someone is looking at all the users that have access to a particular system or software on some type of regular basis.  As an auditor, we prefer that this "someone" is actually someone that is somewhat related to the system and that this "regular basis" is at least quarterly and that they will take action if they find "someone" who should not have access. 

I've had Facebook since it was introduced for Virginia Tech in 2004 so I've had *many* friends over the years that have served various purposes (please help me with my homework was a big one).  I like to do a periodic access review now and again to get rid of people with annoying status updates, people that I have no real connection to, or just people that I don't think add any value to my life (also known as people that I stalk for no good reason but entertainment).  Recently, I started using the tool Friends List Tracker.  Oh.My.Gosh.  Trip down memory lane?  This was more trip down memory back alley.

This list tells you the changes in your friends list daily but it also gives you a list of people you may have once been friends with -- mine is 31 pages long.  THIRTY ONE PAGES.  Some of these pages contain people from high school that I'm sure I was friends with when Facebook first launched or people from college that I had class with at one point.  However some of these people are people I don't even recognize or haven't thought about in years.  This is further proof that I will pretty much friend anyone.  Seriously, how was I friends with people who I can't readily recall?!!  I know some of these were women whose names have changed but not all of them.

But as much as I was appalled by the number of people that I've deleted from my digital life, I was also slightly happy that I had been purging my friends list so frequently....am I that big of a nerd?  Let the button below speak for itself...