Now I don’t really care for Facebook, I got an account after my sister badgered me into it, and I pretty much use it 99% for Scrabble. About 6 months ago, one of my supervisors found me on Facebook and asked to be my friend. I basically accept all friend requests from people I know and I don’t make any myself. Obviously this showed up in other’s news so they made friend requests, so I had about 12-13 work colleagues as friends. I’ve just noticed I now only have about 6 work colleagues as friends. Now I don’t care about Facebook as such, but it may be this is a symptom of some wider attitude towards me in the office. Since I don’t know when I was defriended though, I don’t know what may or may not have caused it. (Mostly I’m oblivious to office politics, and certainly haven’t noticed anything). Is there any way to get historical information about who my have defriended you?
Nope. In fact, the only way to find out that you were defriended at all is to notice on your own that a certain person isn’t showing up in your friends list anymore.
I don’t know you and for all I know you may be totally obnoxious and that’s why everyone defriended you 
but my guess is just that your co-workers got swept up in adding a bunch of officemates, and then realized at some later time that it’s really not such a great idea to have a bunch of work colleagues as your Facebook friends. You may be able to view the friend lists of the people who defriended you, and see if they have other co-workers still listed or not, to get a sense of whether it’s just you.
Another possibility is that if, as the OP seems to suggest, he doesn’t really participate on Facebook, that he just got “pruned” at some point. I’ll go through my friends list every once in a while and defriend people who I never talk to or otherwise interact with.
There is a Greasemonkey script that works. Only works with people who are on your list at the time you install it. Don’t be paranoid, though. I prune people who I don’t necessarily have anything against.
I do the same thing, I don’t want to offend anybody by not accepting friend requests but I like to try to keep it to people I know and care about so I clean out the list every once in a while. It’s defiantly not an ‘I don’t like you thing’ for me, I assume other people are the same. I’m kind of glad facebook doesn’t announce when you unfriend someone.
The Greasemonkey scripts works, but only from the time you install it forward.
I occassionally defriend people too.
Not because I am a gigantic prick, but I notice there are certain people who I call “collector’s”.
They want to get every single person they have ever met in their life and get them on their facebook page.
Basically I defriend if I send you a couple of messages to say hello, and you don’t give the courtesy of a reply (when I see you posting on FB in other areas,) then yeah, ‘fuck ya’, you’re gone.
That’s really my only pet peeve on there.
Some of my ‘collector’ friends have 2,000+ friend’s on their list.
Give me a break already.
Never tried the Greasemonkey thing listed above, but I did like many others here have mentioned and de-friended a number of people. Basically narrowed my list down to about 30 people that I would actually give a crap about, or care what they were up to. The rest were de-friended.
Apparently though, once you defriend them, they can still discover that you’ve defriended you by using one of the many methods that FB has of tryiong to get you to add friends. They can use “friend finder” to search for people with similar things in their background as the searcher, or just do a search on, say, a high school name, and find people who went there.
I’ve had exchanges that went like this:
-I deleted someone I knew in HS, but could give a flip about now.
-Weeks later, a Friend Request shows up from same person “Hey I thought I had you as friend before, but somehow you disappeared”
-now I either have to accept so as to not piss off, or ignore and risk pissing off, or, and this is usually what I do, I decline and send them a note that I’m not active on FB anymore except with family. I have all of my pages blocked to all but friends, so they can’t see how active/not active I am.
Or if your only posts are to promote your blog/business, or if you post political messages 8 times a day, etc.
But facebook isn’t real life. Don;t read anything into people unfriending you.
Were you playing a bunch of Scrabble and letting it automatically notify all of your friends of every move you made? Although people can hide you, or just the Scrabble, sometimes they will defriend instead if they get zillions of game notifications.
I’m not sure the Scrabble application on Facebook still sends unwanted messages out. I believe Facebook removed notifications for all applications on March 1, so this shouldn’t be a problem anymore. However, you can re-check email notifications for yourself in your Facebook Notification Settings. But others would have to do this to get bombarded with emails, and I’m not sure if that includes when people take turns. It might just be for “Nudges”.
Also, I doubt all of Mr. Shine’s office friends (or non-friends) were playing Scrabble with him anyway. I play Scrabble with only about 2% of my Facebook friends, but I think that’s just because I don’t have a lot of word nerd type friends.
PS: I also feel the need to “clean” up my friend list every now and then. Some you add because you worked or went to school with them, but you never really knew them. Seems pointless to keep them as friends when they’re not really “friends”. They’re more like acquaintances.
Thanks for the replies, I feel much less paranoid now:p
For the record I have let Scrabble post something on my behalf on only 2 occasions, both being to boast “Mr Shine has scored x points on on one turn on Scrabble Worldwide” (221 and 176)
Often people prune other people, it’s not a big deal. If you want to make a statement to someone then defirending them on facebook is a crap way of doing it.
Myself I never defriend people as it can cause paranoia. If you’re getting bored of the rubbish that people post, it’s just as easy to put them on ‘Hide’ which means they become pretty much invisible to you.
:head desk:
I’ve got a few people like that on FB. They’re gamers, and evidently feel the need to friend every single person they find while playing Mafia Wars or Farmville or whatever the flavor of the moment is. One of them has over 1500 :eek:
I don’t like FB very much so I’m not over there very often; hence, I have a very small FL there. But it’s funny…the very first person who friended me there was a girl with whom I attended college. We weren’t great friends, but we occasionally ate meals together. She had told me about everyone else from our college she’d found, so of course I either found them/they found me. Then she suddenly dropped me…
It was just weird.
I don’t get pruning. What do you get out of it that is worth it? What purpose does not having them on your friends list serve, that it worth the possibly offending them?
I have not met a single person who is not at least slightly miffed when someone unadds them without telling them why. If the reason is so innocuous, why can’t you at least send these people a note first?
The only thing I can think you get out of it is not getting their wall posts on your newsfeed–but that’s what the hide button is for. Heck, I have a group called “Just to be nice” to not offend the people who try to add me that I don’t want to hear from.
And I will continue to take offense if you unadd me, and we’ve actually talked before. Unless you are my best friend, Facebook is likely the only way I have of contacting you, and you are intentionally cutting that off. It’s not like Facebook makes it easy to find someone again.
If you are so miffed about me not talking to you, how about you actually tell me there’s a problem, so that I can work on correcting it, instead of assuming a bad motive like “collecting,” and giving me no chance to make it right?
Because if it’s some girl I met once at a party 3 months ago and never spoke to again, I don’t particularly care if they’re offended?