This week I turned a year older. It’s a pretty trivial observation really, one I myself thought I might be able to ignore. I only mention it here because my ‘selfish plan’ – my wife’s words – was an utter failure. From the moment I logged on yesterday morning, I had birthday greetings from Asia and points east sitting in my inbox. By mid-morning, they were coming in from around Europe – London, Barcelona, Stockholm, Paris and Zurich – in the form of text messages, Facebook messages, Skype calls, Twitter tweets and Gmail chat bursts. By early afternoon, New York, New Jersey, Maryland and Pennsylvania (nothing from Hillary or Barack, mind you) were wishing me a happy birthday. Then, as the day was coming to an end here in Rome, a flurry more, including lame cracks about getting older, appeared from California. In the end, I received nearly 50 birthday greetings, in four languages. Either I have the most conscientious, well-intentioned friends on the planet, or I owe a lot of people money. That, or, my wife somehow got to them.

In the Facebook/LinkedIn/MySpace/Bebo/Twitter/Skype/Gmail chat era, the chance of quietly celebrating, or even ignoring, a birthday is history. It also is a chore. For me, the Facebook maintenance alone involved in the aging process is a minimum16-hour-job, like covering a global election with staggered poll closings.

I don’t want to appear ungrateful for the barrage of well wishes, and I’m not suggesting these were disingenuous birthday greetings. (Well, maybe I am complaining. And, yes, I am questioning a few. At least three of them came from people I don’t know very well or haven’t seen in years. They might be able to spot me in a crowd, but only if they had my Facebook profile picture handy). What I am stating here is that it’s time we devised a simple social networking etiquette rulebook. The very productivity of the developed world may be at stake.

Here’s where I’d start: alerts for special occasions/milestones.

I’m grateful for the myriad online pings I receive for friends and contacts’ birthdays, their marriages, anniversaries, new hires, new houses, new kids, second marriages, re-hirings, bigger houses, second kids, but if I were to answer them all, I’d never get out of my pyjamas. I’ve recently started a file for pre-scripted, but breezy responses for each occasion – one in English, another in Italian. It seems to work. If you have an assistant, give him or her access to such a file.

But even tracking down the proper automated response can be a massive time dump. Thus, you have to be ruthless. There are whole categories of people you need respond to only sparingly, I’ve concluded. I’m thinking of marginal relatives like cousins, your exes, anybody you hesitantly accepted as a “friend” on Facebook, somebody you were introduced to at a dinner party, anybody who was swept from political office in the last election.

OK, to whom should you dutifully respond? Family (but not always, and never promptly), co-workers, promising business associates, close friends and people who owe you money. Also, it’s always good form to congratulate people who’ve just scored funding or were elected to political office. (Note to self. Time to “friend” the following people: S. Berlusconi, B. Johnson. And shortly thereafter: M. Tsvangirai, B. Obama.)

And which milestones merit a few lines of acknowledgement? Certainly election victories, funding deals, major breakthroughs in science (curing cancer, reversing the aging process, a fix for global warming, all come to mind) and “big” birthdays. Turning 30 or 40 or 50, or anything over 80 – that’s worthy of mention. Not 36. Before this whole social networking phenomenon took off, I could count on receiving a manageable half-dozen birthday e-mails, a few cards, and a round at the pub after work. Not the social networking version of Charles Lindbergh touching down in Paris that I experienced yesterday.

As my friends/contacts/colleagues/virtual friends whom I’ve never actually met, I have to be brutal here. You really went overboard this week. Nobody deserves such a response for such an insignificant milestone as turning 36. But if some good comes of it we can get on with our lives in a more productive fashion

Following this simple formula then of whittling down a virtual friend list in the hundreds to a manageable few dozen will benefit society. Rather than pinging one another with greetings, we can get back to more worthy endeavours – finding a cure for cancer, training for the Champions League final, fighting poverty, hunger and disease. And, by prioritising landmark events properly, you won’t be cheating the company, and, more importantly, you won’t be subjecting a grumpy ‘birthday boy’ to a barrage of reminders he just turned a year older.

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Bernhard Warner, a freelance journalist and media consultant, writes about technology, the internet and media industries. He can be reached at techscribe@gmail.com

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