It’s true, Facebook makes it pretty easy to connect with friends online.  But what happens after you’ve mutually agreed to be friends with someone? The Facebook news feed does a good amount to inform you as to what’s going on with those in your friends list.  But beyond the Birthday reminders, there’s not a whole lot that Facebook does to help you manage your online relationships.  If you feel like your friends are falling through the cracks and you just can’t keep up with all the things you need to do for relationship maintenance, Socialfly is here to help.

A finalist in the current user-voted fbFund round, Socialfly is looking to take the next step in helping you keep track of your friends and the activities you’d like to do with them. Acting as a social secretary, Socialfly will track the friends that are most important to you, and send you a reminder for when you should shoot them a private message.  You can indicate various things like an activity or task you’d like to do with a particular friend, such as going to the movies with them on Friday, or sending them an email next week to follow up on their latest accomplishment.

One downfall for Socialfly’s current system is that it still requires a level of self-initiated updating to the Socialfly system.  Who’s going to remind me to do that? Offering remote input options, such as email or SMS submission, would allow users to send Socialfly a friend-specific reminder request if I’m not logged into Facebook, or even if I’m on the go.

Another upcoming Socialfly feature will be a ratings-like ability to mark the priority level for tracked friends, which, if automated to any degree, could be somewhat similar to Skydeck’s “real social network” concept that determines importance based on the levels of ongoing communication.  Socialfly will also layer in a Timer addon, which will allow you to indicate how often you’d like to be reminded to get in touch with particular friends.

As Facebook has been adding more functionality to the news feed, such as the option to see varying amounts of information pertaining to one friend or application, I imagine many of Socialfly’s features can be layered into Facebook’s native news feed.  Being a potential winner of the fbFund makes me think that Socialfly and its useful relationship maintenance tools would make an attractive acquisition for Facebook, should Facebook ever decide to acquire an application.  Otherwise, any duplication of Socialfly’s features that Facebook does add to the news feed could eventually render Socialfly an unused application, which is becoming a real fear for apps like BirthdayAlert.

If you are a fan of the Socialfly application, go vote for Socialfly via the fbFund application.