You can unfollow people on Facebook without unfriending them. Works wonders for people who you have a relationship with, but don't necessarily need to see their stream of posts.
There's also a new 'snooze' feature, where you can 'snooze' a person for 30 days.
Interesting that managing friendships and relationships with these tools feels an awful lot like....work does. Everything compartmentalized, specific functions to deal with people down stream..