IT is time for a clear out. Not of the old pizza boxes and random women’s underwear that litter my living quarters. No, it is my social networking site that needs a spring clean.

Over the short time I have been on it I have accumulated 200 “friends”.

I don’t know that many people in real life – certainly not people I like.

By Facebook standards this is a fairly modest statistic; I have seen some claiming acquaintance teetering over 1,000.

Yet I still feel my list would benefit from a judicious edit.

Facebook is ideal for sharing photos with your close circle and keeping in touch with old friends.

However, my page is clogged up with people I have vaguely known desperately trying to boost their number, or people who should have drifted out of my life – particularly ex-girlfriends.

In the dark days before Facebook, these awkward creatures would disappear from your life with just a few empty promises to stay in touch.

Occasionally, you might suffer the embarrassment of bumping into them while shopping or on a night out. If the dating gods were particularly angry with you, they might have been accompanied by an attractive new partner.

Thanks to the wonders of technology though, you now get blow-by-blow progress updates of your exses’ dating romantic trials and tribulations through social networking sites.

Little snippets about “being in a relationship”, coy little comments on their profiles through “engaged” to finally “married”.

I have already had the pain of reading the comments of one girl I liked idly chatting about wedding invites and dresses.

It is not just past loves that infest my networking account – it also contains a number of fledgling relationships that never really got started.

Nowadays it seems that when you meet a potential love bunny it is common practice to “Facebook” them as opposed to risk the embarrassment of asking for a mobile phone number.

It also means you can each find out a bit more about the other and get a clear, non-alcohol-induced idea of what each other looks like before you meet up.

However, when things don’t work out, it seems an overreaction to remove someone from your Facebook.

It might hurt their feelings but, far more important, it might look as if your feelings are hurt, which would mean they were winning the break-up.

It is far more healthy to choke back the tears whenever you read a new message on their wall but have them think you never cared about them even a little.

I have also noticed some people add their children as friends on Facebook – I imagine the rest of the population have to work out some other way of embarrassing the hell out of their kids.

Thankfully, I don’t have to worry about this with my parents as my dad is deeply suspicious of all forms of new technology and has more than once blamed Facebook for entirely unrelated problems.

My mum has no idea how the Internet works and will regularly pass me a laptop, with a helpless look, and ask me to “make that Goggle thing come up”.