With a new year comes new friends; however, the term friend has been completely violated thanks to social media sites like Facebook. This once sacred term was one of endearment, but now it is thrown around to the point that a random person off the street is considered one’s friend.

When Facebook first became popular, users would connect with people they actually spent time and talked with. These were the genuine friends.

Now, it seems the main goal of the popular social media outlet is to garner as many friends as possible. The little kid down the street from your childhood home, the kid you used to babysit until you moved, the kid who you never contacted again, is now sending you a request to be your friend. 

The rare people we encounter in everyday life have no right to bear the title of friend. To fix this, Facebook has created three main ways to deal with these so-called friends.

The oldest way is the power to accept, decline or ignore their friend request. It is simple enough: accept the true friends and decline the ones who are not. However, for those faint of heart, this option requires too many difficult decisions. After all, this is not such a black and white issue.

For many, the option to ignore a friend request is too easy and creates a Facebook purgatory. This occurs when ignored friend requests are not dealt with and merely stay piled up on your requests.

The more aggressive alternative is to flat out block the friend request. This option is only appropriate for those users who are truly enemies, or nosy mothers.

The more modern method, and my personal favorite, is to group similar types of friends together. For example, you can put your high school friends in the same chat group and share or block status updates with or from them.

However, the same problem of appointing an identical title to your ex-girlfriend and your high school best friend still arises. Therefore, I have taken this categorizing a step further.

I take my true friends and stick them in a group of their own, while the random acquaintances from various life encounters get put into their own, special category–the randoms.

Then there are the friends that would never be your actual friend in the real world, but want to monitor your online life–ex-girlfriends, ex-friends and even archenemies. These are put into the untouchable group, and occasionally there are certain status updates geared directly towards them.

By creating categories for the virtual friends of Facebook, one does not encounter the awkward situation of falsely stating they are your friend.

While all three ways of filtering through the good apples of friendship are effective, the ultimate battle against these so-called friends is to demonstrate who your real friends are in real life, rather than distress over your virtual ones.