I’ve been “unfriended” by my 15-year-old daughter. No, I don’t mean she’s stopped talking to me. But Merav and I are no longer friends on Facebook.

The ostensible reason? We grounded her. She accepted her punishment but in retribution she blocked me access to her profile. That means no more status updates, no photo albums from the latest school trip tagging her friends, no private messaging.

Oh yes, she unfriended my wife too.

Now, you might say that communicating via Facebook is the ultimate dehumanization of the parent-child relationship. It was bad enough when we started instant messaging each other in the same house. But I’ve come to rely on reading Merav’s status line to know how she’s feeling.

Did she have a good day at school? Is she upset with a friend? Did she enjoy last night’s movie? It’s all updated in near real time, whether at home or school. Pretty much wherever there’s a WiFi connection.

My wife took a more sanguine approach. “A teenager needs her independence. She shouldn’t have her parents watching her every move online,” she said.

Maybe. But did Merav have to be so glib about it? She practically danced around the room when she informed me of my demotion.

Apparently, I’m not alone in the friend/unfriend conundrum. The New York Times last week ran a piece about the subject. Author Douglas Quenqua delineates the different types of unfriendings, from the impersonal – removing a contact you made a party, for example, but whom you can no longer remember – to the vindictive (like Merav).

It’s probably a good idea to weed out old Facebook connections from time to time. That must have been what was behind a recent Burger King promotion, called “The Whopper Sacrifice,” where the hamburger chain offered a free Whopper to anyone who severed bonds with 10 of their friends.

Burger King says that the viral promotion contributed to the ending of some 234,000 friendships before it was shut down after Facebook informed the company that it was violating the site’s Terms of Service by sending notifications letting the unlucky unfriended know that they been dumped for a sandwich. (Facebook doesn’t email you when you’ve been unfriended; you have to find out more serendipitously.)

The entire campaign struck me as terribly cynical but nevertheless deliciously amusing.

I’ve already written here on the blog about how I use social media – Facebook and Twitter in particular – as a business tool. I find both services to be invaluable sources of industry news that I put to use here on AIMGroup.com. My colleague Shannon Kinney is also a big time user.

Sometimes, though, you put out a friend request and the person doesn’t respond. You start to wonder why. Did the person just not see the email asking him or her to confirm? Or was there some hidden animosity that led the person to refuse. I reached out to several colleagues with whom I’d had business fallings out years ago. I hoped that maybe the informal chatty Facebook culture would break the ice. I still haven’t heard from them.

For the uninitiated, all this may sound like a huge time suck. It can certainly be that way if you don’t manage your inclinations with enough tough self-love. But ignoring it means missing out on what has become this century’s biggest social phenomenon.

Just consider the numbers. More than one in five of the entire Internet population has been to Facebook. That’s the number from ComScore, which reported that in December 2008, 222 million people visited the site, or 22 percent of the total Internet audience, clocking up a staggering 80 billion monthly page views. That’s up over 120 percent from the same month in 2007.

Maybe that’s why it’s been such a blow to lose my daughter’s Web companionship.

I’ve asked her several times to reconsider. Her response: “You’re not my friend, you’re my father.”

Well, I suppose I can’t argue with that. And I can still see her status updates on her Gmail chat and Skype. At least until I go and blab about it publically and she blocks me there.

Ooops.