Yep! I have been doing this too...it's amazing. I deleted all my blogs ('cept for my research website), protected my Tweets, shut down or deactivated most social network sites, cleared out unread/unwanted RSS feeds, made photos private, unsubscribed from junk emails, made filters for things, and on and on. I do a little bit each day, and it's fun to find new things to make me lighter.

Now I'm at the point where if I get an email in my personal account, it's like a nice welcome surprise from someone I actually want to hear from. Instead of before, when it was just an interruption to delete.

I can actually read all my feeds in the morning AND the news. Which is incidentally how I discovered this MetaChat post.

Also, reading Facebook status updates don't make me feel like crap about my life compared to others. My wall is filled with things I really want to know about, because it's written by people I care about deeply. It's like I brought the wall closer to me, instead of standing 20 feet back with stuff to take in a half-mile wide.

I guess I'm trying to do a few things well and passionately, instead of spreading myself thin all over the internet!

I have more people on FB who are not on my feed than people who are. It's refreshing!

I did an email subscription purge a week or so ago and cut my incoming email by half. It will probably creep up again, but it's nice while it lasts.

Heh, must be the change of seasons or something ;-) A few days ago, I finally started unsubscribing from some of the things that clog up my inbox when it became clear that I was missing important things in the flood of crap that I never read and couldn't even remember why I'd signed up for in the first place. It's already made a difference and I think I'm going to keep going and purge a lot of on-line things that take up my time and attention and that don't particularly interest me any more.

Ah, I'm not alone. We've all reached a moment.

I just went through a mass FB defriending and let go of about 150 people. I'm trying to use it much, much less. It felt good and already, my feed is a LOT cleaner and shorter to read. And what's best is that it's all people I'm really happy to hear from.

Spending a lot less time online in general. And I realized I really want a private life that's private, not a "private life" which people who I am totally forgetting about can randomly access while I forget about it.

My Twitter is professional-only so I'm not worried about that.

I suspect this is why I have fewer Facebook complaints than most people: my Friends list is almost exclusively actual friends, people I would happily invite to my home for dinner. There are maybe three people in there I haven't met face-to-face, but I'd love to.

When I first started using FB, I had a few erstwhile friends in the mix, people I used to know but grew distant from --- for good reason, it turns out. Maybe two or three years ago, I messaged each of them explaining that I was experimenting with narrowing my list (and making reference to a then-recent FB privacy issue, which was part of my motivation) to family and my immediate social circle; then I defriended them.

Most of them understood completely... or pretended to, whichever. One responded with a really nasty message, which only cemented my pleasure at severing that connection.

I know different people use [Twitter/Facebook/blogs] in different ways; keeping my list small and personal really works for me.

My wall is filled with things I really want to know about, because it's written by people I care about deeply.

That's such a nice feeling, isn't it?