I don't really have 1,146 friends, but as of today, and according to Facebook, I do.  Professor Robin Dunbar says I can only maintain 150 friendships (which is where Path's 150 friend limit comes from). Whether you agree with that or not, there's a high likelyhood that you have a number of "friends" on Facebook who you have a vague-at-best knowledge of who they are.

For me, this is a symptom of not wanting to have to constantly decide who's friend request I'd accept and whose I wouldn't over the years. I've met lots of people at conferences or events, through work or travels, so it's just been easier to accept everyone than to spend the time figuring out if I actually know them.

There are ways to get a signal of whether a request is coming from a completely random person, but the only work-free option Facebook offers up is displaying the number of mutual friends you have in the friend request UI.

While it would seem that the easy fix would be to go to your friend page and simply unfriend the people you don't know, Facebook actually makes this process pretty painful. Beyond it taking multiple clicks to unfriend someone, you end up with option paralysis when looking at a large group of people and trying to systematically decide who stays and who goes.

I have a solution: unfriend people on their birthday.

This is a process that will take a full year from the day you decide to start. Since there are rarely double-digit numbers of people's birthdays in a single day, it's much more manageable. You're simply presented with a few people per day via Facebook's birthday notifications on your homepage to choose from. See a name you don't recognize? Unfriend. Simple as that.

Plus, I'm pretty sure that when you unfriend someone, it automatically pushes them to subscribing to your feed (unless you choose to block that person), so the chance they'll notice the change in relationship status is very low. Obviously, this only works if the person you've friended has chosen to display their birthday, but once you've fully pruned your list, the people you don't recognize will become a lot more obvious to you.

So there you have it. Get your Facebook social graph under control in manageable, habitual way in 365 days. Give it a try!