How many Facebook friends do you have whom you don’t know in real life? I would not be surprised if you say a majority of them are.
So, you ever thought of dumping some of them? If you have, then November 17th – National Unfriend Day, is a good alibi to cut off a major chunk of people from your network.
Well, it’s not official, but that’s what Jimmy Kimmel urge people to do on Jimmy Kimmel Live on Wednesday night.
He announced a new national holiday called “National Unfriend Day,” to be observed on November 17 to “pull out some weeds out of your life.” 
Personally, I think a majority of the Facebook users won’t be be ready to weed out those unknown friends yet. For some, it’s cool to be connected with many people either to show off, to know about what’s going on with whom, or just for the sake of contacts for different reasons. While a majority of the users (maybe around 200 million) needs lots and lots of unknown friends to enjoy the different apps on Facebook.
So, will you observe Jimmy Kimmel’s official “National Unfriend Day”? What is your opinion?
If you haven’t watched the show, you can view a clip of the show at Youtube. Click here.
Social-networking-made-up words are giving a hard time to all the technical words that comes out every year in the run for WOTY or “Word Of The Year” title. Every new technology brings along a lot of new words with it. Meanwhile made-up words used on social-networking site are also on the rise with millions of people online on different social-networking sites day in and day out.
Our own, constantly used, word on Facebook and other social-networking sites “Unfriend” has been declared as the WOTY. Word of the year guys! Don’t you think its cool? Now, we can all use the word with confidence even if our word checker shows a scary red line under it.
Unfriend: (verb) “To remove someone as a ‘friend’ on social-networking site such as Facebook.”
As in, “I decided to unfriend my roommate on Facebook after we had a fight,” illustrates the Oxford University Press blog.
“(Unfriend) has both currency and potential longevity,” Christine Lindberg, senior lexicographer for Oxford’s U.S. dictionary program, said in the NOAD blog. “In the online social networking context, its meaning is understood, so its adoption as a modern verb form makes this an interesting choice for Word of the Year.”
So, our word “unfriend” will be entering into the New Oxford American Dictionary’s 2010 edition. Some of the other tech-savvy words going along with the WOTY are:
Hashtag – a # [hash] sign added to a word or phrase that enables Twitter users to search for tweets (postings on the Twitter site) that contain similarly tagged items and view thematic sets
Intexticate – distracted because of texting on a cell phone while driving a vehicle
Netbook – a small, very portable laptop computer with limited memory
Paywall – a way of blocking access to a part of a Web site that is only available to paying subscribers
Sexting – the sending of sexually explicit texts and pictures by cell phone
In recent years, social-networking words like “Twitter” and “Facebook” has also enter the dictionary.
