When Facebook first appeared, the issue of “to friend or not to friend” didn’t seem worth sweating over. After all, it wasn’t like this college-born networking service was central to your life or anything. Only now, for many of us, it pretty much is. And for too many of its half a billion active users, that carelessly assembled cohort known as the friend list has become a monster.

The list is the gateway through which people observe our major life events, casual musings, physical peregrinations, and crop yields on FarmVille. As Facebook engineers add more features, the friend list becomes ever more critical. But because most of us began assembling it with little sense of its eventual importance, we often accepted requests out of impulse, inertia, or obligation. And sometimes we asked others for Facebook friendship out of idle curiosity or a temporary need to see a photo. Or we just clicked the wrong box.

I propose that Facebook grant us a friend-list do-over. Like most people, I desperately need one: At this point, my collection resembles the contents of a house occupied by a hoarder. I make my way past heaps of classmates, overfriendly PR people, and folks whose amusing conversations in hotel bars led to morning-after friend requests. Open a closet and out tumble a Chinese poet, sources from stories I wrote for now-defunct publications, and one of my son’s high-school friends with whom he hasn’t spoken in years. Trying to find the front door, I trip over the mashup artist Girl Talk, whom I met once in Pittsburgh. Meanwhile, many of my best friends and closest business contacts aren’t even in the house.

Here’s how we fix it: On a designated day, everybody’s friend list is reset to zero. This goes beyond efforts like National Unfriend Day. I’m suggesting Facebook let us wipe the slate totally clean and start over. Then we can refill the coordinates of our respective social graphs only with appropriate people. Facebook would present us with a list of current contacts, allowing us to reinvite those we want to keep with a single click. We could also import contacts from other services—webmail, calendars, social sites—to round out our modified lists. In return, Facebook would agree to let us export our friend list to other services (thus saving the company from what looks to be an inevitable demand for government regulation if it insists on anticompetitive friend-hoarding).

True, the days following the reset might be stressful; some of our requests might not be reciprocated. But we would also get a whole lot of invites from others, many of whom may well be important people in our lives whom we never thought of as Facebook buddies. A reset would also be a bonanza for Facebook, as any remaining nonmembers would be flooded with invites.

To soften the blow of rejection, everyone would have the chance to post a “statement of friending principles” that would provide a rationale for jilting. Mine would explain that my new standards limit my list to people I actually recognize in person, or at least those with whom I’ve corresponded. (Exceptions for Girl Talk and other rock stars.) I would also sketch out parameters for requesters: If you beat me up in fifth grade, don’t expect a good outcome.

If all went well, our friend lists would much more closely reflect those we want to talk to and be poked by. I propose July 4 for the Great Facebook Mulligan. It’s a perfect day to declare independence from the temporary connections that have become eternal social millstones and to link instead to our true compatriots. Everybody in?

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