National UnFriend Day, a holiday conceived by late night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel, has just ended and he has declared it a success. “National UnFriend Day was the fourth most trending topic on Google” he said on tonight’s show. He played a collection of clips that showed his holiday all over the news.
“Facebook,” Kimmel said, “is cheapening the meaning of the word ‘friend’.” He insisted that the campaign wasn’t against Facebook or friendship, but that it was about being closer to your ‘real friends’
At one point in his campaign, Kimmel claimed that the ‘x’ button on the friend list that would instantly eliminate friends had vanished. This would have made removing friends more complicated. I checked it out and didn’t notice anything missing. I have no idea why he would have said that something was.
Kimmel had help from celebrities such as William Shattner, Darius Rucker, Wolf Blitzer and two former cast members of the comedy series Friends donated their time to support the cause.
Kimmel set up 3 booths outside his Hollywood studio with a computer in each. A long line of people waited for the chance to participate in the holiday and possibly get on TV. After removing a few friends they would get a chance to talk to Cousin Sal and a camera man.
A woman who claimed to have 1,200 friends said that she unfriended two people. One of them was her father.
Another man unfriended an ex-girlfriend who had set his lawn on fire.
This wasn’t exactly what Kimmel had in mind, but he seemed more than happy to have such entertaining people on his show.
To see if National Unfriend Day had an effect on any of my friends (actual friends), I recorded the number of friends we on each had Facebook last night. After 24 hours of the holiday, we had gained 3 friends, but lost 21.
Most of those came as a result of one of them participating in it herself. She dumped 17 people who had added their entire high school class or tried recruiting her to sororities. The three others who lost either one or two friends had no idea who did it or why.
For those of you who missed out on the holiday, Kimmel suggests jettisoning so called ‘friends’ that annoy you any time of year. Especially his arch enemy Gina Lovato, who he used as an example of an annoying friend. She originally had 455 friends and now she has over 3,000 despite Kimmel’s repeated requests of his audience to unfriend her.
