Facebook to Keep the 5,000 Friend Limit… Good
Sorry Jason Calacanis, Robert Scoble, Justine Ezarik, and all you other “Facebook Whales,” the 5,000 friend limit stays - at least according to :
It was a fake rumor. I just spoke to a friend at Facebook about the 5000 friends limit. He told me it was a fake and they are not going to remove the 5000 friends limit.
A lot of people are going to say that this is a big mistake, but shockingly, I am not one of them. Facebook Whales, do you really have 5,000 real friends? I know you are going to say that everyone who follows you on Twitter, or reads your blog is a “friend,” but I don’t think that’s how Facebook defines friends. In fact, Facebook Pages seems to work perfectly for these “friends” of yours.
I personally, and I may be in the minority, only accept Facebook requests from individuals I have met with, and conversed with, in real life. This is not because I am a bad person (at least I don’t think so), but this is because I truly like using Facebook the way I do. I read my newsfeed often, and if my newsfeed is filled with names I don’t recognize, then it seems rather useless. I check my friends recent updates, and if those recent updates consist of unfamiliar faces, then Facebook loses its value to me.
I think part of my separation is the fact that more than half of my Facebook friends are friends from high school or college. I used Facebook regularly before the company decided to open up to the rest of the population.
Facebook doesn’t want to become Myspace. Facebook doesn’t want to house the next Tila Tequila. Facebook has finally made a clear distinction between when to use a Facebook profile, and when to use a Facebook page - and I like it.
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May 18th, 2008 at 9:34 pm
The only thing I would say is that perhaps the way you find facebook useful is not the way Justine or Robert Scoble finds it useful. People have different ways to use services. I think facebook should leave it up to the individual user to choose how many friends they want to add. You and I might want to only add “real life friends”, but there are some people that see value in having as many people as possible see their facebook profile.
I just don’t see why facebook should decide how they want people to use their service. I don’t see any technical reason to not allow this feature. Myspace handles hundreds of thousands of friends easily. Sure, facebook doesn’t want to be myspace, but their not. It’s up the the individual user how that person wants to have their profile used.
May 18th, 2008 at 9:46 pm
THANK GOD!
I really think they should make the limit even shorter to like 1000 people.
There is no need at ALL to have 5k “friends”. I’m close to 200 myself, but I don’t add every Tom, Dick or Harry on the internets.
Facebook is for REAL friends and people who you have something in common with and not for people with unwarranted self-importance.
May 18th, 2008 at 10:07 pm
I think it’s a good idea that they kept the 5,000 friend limit. I like Facebook a lot more than Myspace. I liked the idea that in the beginning it was used to connect with people from your college or high school, and I didn’t really like it when they opened it up to the general public because I felt a little safe there because you had to use your school email and you knew people were legit, whereas Myspace, I have never felt that safety. Unless I’ve talked to somebody on a regular basis on Facebook, I usually don’t add them, but I have to admit, I did add Leo Laporte, but come on .. he was saying all the time on TWIT “add me!”
May 19th, 2008 at 10:08 am
Still, how does it effect your individual use of facebook if Justine, Leo, and Robert, etc have 30,000 friends on facebook? You don’t have to friend them if you don’t want to. And you obviously wouldn’t be required to friend people that you don’t know just because there isn’t a cap. Just because you wouldn’t add people you don’t know doesn’t mean no one should have that option.
May 19th, 2008 at 11:25 am
@Chance
I think my biggest beef with allowing more than 5,000 friends, and something I should have mentioned in my post, is that it can promote spamming. Just like Myspace, the angle of opening up bots to add friends becomes a lot more attractive if you can get 100,000 friends instead of 5,000 friends.
If the Justine’s or the Leo’s or the Robert’s want to have more than 5,000 - they should check out what Kevin Rose is doing - http://www.facebook.com/pages/Kevin-Rose/6162642477 - he’s got 8500 “friends”
May 19th, 2008 at 7:25 pm
I think I might differ a bit. We all seem to place value or rules about which social network we do what. If you choose to make facebook be your “personal” network, then that’s fine. But I don’t think that the website should be the one to stop you from using it how you wish.
If you want to be a public figure, why wouldn’t they let you scale?