In an effort to further its competitive edge against rival Google Plus by allowing customers to divide their contacts into distinct clusters, Facebook is suggesting that its users create a separate sub-category of connections called "Close Enemies."
"Already, on the left sidebar, you will find Facebook prompting you to break out the people you know into subgroups, one of which is 'Close Friends'." said Ernest L. Bloch, a spokesperson for company co-founder Mark Zuckerberg. "Choosing which of the people in your network are stimulating enough for this distinction will, of course, immediately exclude a bunch of half-assed, pseudo-friends who, because of their inherent inferiority and complete and utter douchiness, no longer belong among those you would actually give a crap about if they suddenly dropped dead."
It is not much of a leap, said Bloch, to conclude that once these inadequate sub-humans realize they are not getting status updates as frequently as they used to and have been effectively rejected by someone they once held dear, they will in all likelihood be more appropriately labeled as 'enemies.'
"This represents a new level of convenience in the social networking realm," he added. "Imagine having everyone whose friend request you once accepted only because you did not want to offend, or because they had a hot avi but then turned out to post lame crap about embroidery or just because you were obsessed with having 3,000 friends so you could brag about it on the few occasions you stopped interacting with a screen of some kind and actually went to a party or something... anyway, imagine having all these pretty much useless pieces of human detritus in one handy list! They're your Close Enemies!"
Early reaction to the new feature has been largely positive. "I don't know who half these morons are anyway," said one Facebook user whose friends indeed number in the thousands. "Screw them."
"What's still left to question," said Bloch, "is how Facebook can track a person's loathing of another person the same way it can track his or her likes. But we're confident that once we find out who people secretly hate, that we can release that information to marketers and develop an even more in-depth profile of one of our consumers. I'm sorry, I mean one of our Facebook users."
When asked about the possibility that winnowing out extraneous friends and focusing mainly on a small group of more intimate acquaintances could point to the fact that we might as well just go back to sending each other emails, Facebook declined to comment.
James Napoli is an author and humorist. More of his comedy content for the web can be seen here.