ReadWriteWeb

The digital age is redefining the idea of memories. The line between public and private is constantly blurring, and digitally native parents are claiming their kids' brands at an early age.

What impact does posting images to social networks have on a child's future perception of their own childhood memories? The idea of memory is evolving and becoming ever more participatory, especially as social networks become an even more embedded part of our everyday lives.

The adage says: "Keep your friends close and your enemies closer." And that's exactly what the creators of EnemyGraph had in mind. It's an application that allows users to list their "enemies," whether these are ideological enemies of your mind, Facebook friends, pages or even groups. Hate a politician? Name that person as an enemy on EnemyGraph. If you install EnemyGraph and declare yourself a hater, you should know that you're certainly not alone. EnemyGraph currently has 10,000 users.

EnemyGraph presents an interesting alternative to the homogenous liking culture that Facebook engenders. That is, if you don't want to like something, you have only two options: ignore it completely, or leave a snarky "dislike" type of comment. If you do the latter, it's easy to come off as a jerk - and you don't want to feign negativity on a network based on positive interaction, now do you? With EnemyGraph, you can silently hate without causing any harm to others. Change the settings to "Only You" and no one has to see how much you dislike others on Facebook. Because haters gonna hate, ya dig?

If you've been defriending a lot lately, you're not alone.

A new study out from Pew today confirms what we already know: People don't want to collect as many Facebook friends as possible. Social networkers are becoming more selective, managing their accounts and "pruning" people from their lists. More users are untagging themselves from photos, deleting comments and unfriending others. Women and younger users tend to prune more than others: 67% of women with social network site profiles have deleted users compared with 58% of men.

What happens when we don't accept friend requests? Facebook brings them back in yet another attempt to "help" us get to know other people who may be in our network.

When Facebook first entered college campuses in 2004, we friended people we knew. It became a game, a way to waste time between classes and something to do when we should have been working on papers. There was no need for us to try and figure out who our mutual friends were because we saw them in real life on a daily basis. They sat next to us in classrooms, at lunch; we saw them at parties, we ate brunch together on the weekend. Things were simple.

As Facebook grew and changed, the uses for a profile changed, too. Facebook decided to step in and lend a hand, identifying people who had high numbers of mutual friends, and suggesting that we connect or reconnect. For the egotistically inclined, this simple trick worked. And before long, we didn't even know what we're using Facebook for.

Login and make a Facebook birthday wish! Receive a multitude of classic happy birthdays. Celebrate your existence on Earth in a truly virtual style.

The oddest aspect of Facebook birthdays is the re-emergence of dormant social connections. Facebook makes it oh-so-easy to reconnect with people you may have forgotten you were even "friends" with. And then all of a sudden they're up on your wall, sending you birthday shoutouts like the good ol' days.

"A cute baby dolphin for your weekend-viewing pleasure" a Facebook friend of mine writes. Under the text, I see a link to an imgur-hosted image of that amazingly adorable marine mammal. Suddenly, my day is feeling a lot better. Did I just catch a mood... on Facebook?

A new study by Facebook data scientists shows that Facebook users can spread emotions to their friends through messages, posts and status updates. It suggests that emotional contagion happens quite frequently on the world's biggest social network. Facebook's Chief Data Scientist Adam Kramer presented these findings at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology on January 27, 2012.

"It's time to rethink how emotional contagion works, since vocal cues and mimicry aren't needed," said Kramer.

Reuters reports that a Tennessee couple who "defriended" Jenelle Potter on Facebook were murdered by her father and another man.

"This is just senseless," said Johnson County Sheriff Mike Reece told Reuters. "We've had murders, but nothing like this."

Jenelle Potter, 30, is one of those types who you just don't mess with. She is a Facebook fanatic who stays home with her parents and is constantly on Facebook.

"Once you've crossed her, you've crossed her father too," Reece said.

Facebook can be whatever you want it to be. It's a promotional tool, a way to keep in touch with family members, a space for lifestreaming your every move, or a community forum for meaningful discussion about a specific topic.

But sometimes, it all just gets too overwhelming to deal with. You have 1500 Facebook friends from all walks of life - why? Those social ties expired long ago. So what's the point of holding onto that one last digital thread?

Last week Jenni Prokopy, a Chicago-based health care expert, freelance writer and founder of ChronicBabe.com, posted a status update that directly addressed this issue. With about 800 friends, Prokopy realized that her Facebook profile had become totally cluttered. "I started my Facebook a few years ago when there were no business pages," Prokopy says. "People knew who I was online from ChronicBabe.com, so they started to friend me on Facebook. And I was just trying to build my online community so I said yes - and everyone was like yeah, build your online community! And so I did."

Picture this: You're at a party, and your good friend introduces you to one of their friends. You two hit it off, and boom - a new friend! You've just become friends with a friend of a friend. In real life, this is a common occurrence. On Facebook, a friend of a friend isn't necessarily an actual friend.

A new study from Pew Internet discovered this and an array of other interesting facts about peoples' Facebook friendships. The researchers found that most peoples' friend lists were not very interconnected. In a friend list with a density of 1, everyone knows everyone. On Facebook the density is quite low at .12 with a maximum density of .42, which means that your chances of knowing a friend of a friend on Facebook fall between 12% and 42%. In its its S-1 filing on Wednesday, Facebook toted 100 billion friendships. What it probably meant to say was 100 billion connections, many of which are dormant.

If you feel compelled to curate more of your Facebook life, there's an app for that: Timeline Movie Maker. Go to TimelineMovieMaker.com and click the green button. As with most Facebook apps, this one asks for your basic info, email, profile info and your Timeline stories. Then Timeline builds a one-minute movie for you. It's similar to Intel's Museum of Me, a virtual museum of you - all it needs is access to your Facebook data.