There are "friends" and "friends" in this game.
Some are people you indeed do spend a lot of time with, chatting, planning group activities. Others are people you befriended for specific reasons (a certain quest, a trade or a short time of communication).
Would it be possible to have an "ignore" function for status updates of some of your friends? As the game goes on, there are more and more friends piling up, and my homepage shows me a lot of people I might be "friends" with, but where I am only slightly interested in their ingame progress. I would be much more interested in following the ingame progress of real life friends, specific people from certain groups, and so on.