Sorry I missed this one over the weekend, @kathyweir!  There isn’t a way to restrict the friends notifications in that little notification bar at the top.  You can change what you get e-mailed by going into your account settings.  

You should only be getting notified when people reply to posts that you’ve replied to and things like that.  Are you getting more notifications?

@andrea-vahl Andrea thanks for the info on the notifications. A friend of mine was asking about it and I thought I would see if there was an answer. This week I spent time redoing all my list and I noticed two major changes. The first was the increase in my notifications and the second is I am seeing more postings in my most recent newsfeed. There must be some correlation.