I was just over at Facebook and noticed that the option to create Friends Lists had been activated. Now you can organize your friends by type (handy). Now I’ve just got to find a spare 4 hours to sort through them all (feel free to befriend me here).
Speaking of Facebook – Mark Cuban has written about his new Facebook Strategy now that he’s hit the 5000 friend limit. I think we’ll see more and more people begin to hit this ceiling and grapple with what to do.
5000 people? thats kinda insane….I wonder how many people in that list would be used for personal things other than advertisement?
Wow, thats unbelievable!
For long time I have stayed out of facebook because I felt it was a time eater( well it actually is because I have seen people using facebook for most part of there day),but now as I am hearing more and more good news about it I would try it out.The whole idea of getting 5000 friends is giving me the impetus.
I’d like to see more high-profile people/organizations setting up the new Facebook Pages. This way people can list themselves as a “fan” without having to try to get on your friend list
5000 friends is quite full on. Perhaps some culling is in order. I’m still in 2 minds about Facebook. About all I do at the moment with it is play Scrabulous.
5000 friends seems ridiculous to me, but then again I use facebook as a way to keep in contact with actual real life friends as opposed to a marketing tool…
Myspace on the other hand, total marketing spam tool..hehe
I know a couple of guys who are already earning some money from their facebook’s friend lists
I’m just glad I made it into your first 5000 friends, but I wonder… what list will you put me in? :-)
The friend list will be very helpful, especially when inviting friends to join groups, challenges, play games, or just share stuff. No offense, but I haven’t invited you to join my 20th college reunion group.
Without even getting into the weak ties vs. strong ties discussion, what a strange number.. 5000! I wonder who was in charge of determining that value as an “absolute limit”.. Luckily I have about 4500 friends headroom at the moment. :)
I guess with an upper limit of 5000, facebook is really meant to help you keep track of anyone you’ve ever interacted with, in person, online, or both. I really hope my number of friends never gets above 200 or so.
I started a Facebook acount and I check it maybe once a month. I guess Myspace is still the devil I know. I’ll have to read Mark’s post and maybe get some ideas.
Facebook is in the news a lot lately and it seems like everyone has a Facebook profile. I have one, but I rarely use it, and whenever I do, I revert right back to MySpace, which is far more flexible. I don’t see what all the fuss is over Facebook.
-Melissa Donovan
Writing Forward
I am gonna add you in my friend list.
Its so funny, I actually used facebook back when i was a wee little freshman in college and knew nothing about internet marketing. I honestly hate how it has progressed so to speak. I feel like it is getting more and more like myspace and i hate that. Less is more if you ask me, but thats just my minimalist mindset.
I, too, am a Fan of Fan Pages(?!). FB has do do alot of work to get ’em right though, there isn’t even a Directory (of Pages?)
I really should have some sort of Facebook strategy, but sadly, I do not. Its one of those things on my to-do list. Can anyone point out any great post(s) that go over potential avenues for enhancing a blog through Facebook?
I’m with Jeremiah – I really hate what Facebook has become. It used to be really nice for keeping tabs on your college friends. It was nice in the regard that it only let you register if you had a .edu address; this really cut down on spam. Now it is run down with spammy Application requests, advertisements in the feeds, and strange people PM’ing others about “business opportunities”…
I noticed they’ve changed the “Recently Added Friends” layout as well. I like the changes they’ve made so far.
Now if there were only an option telling you who has deleted you. lol
I had a Facebook page a while ago, but I never got into it. I’ll just keep my Myspace page for now. I have enough to keep up with. 5k is alot of friends, but I guess that would be good for marketing.
Well…I guess we need a strategy for Facebook friends once we reach a significant mass.
I’m assuming anything beyond 500+ friends would have a significantly large portion of “unknown friends” in the list.
I really need to look into facebook. Not really spent enough time looking at how it could impact my sites.
Hmm, 5000 “friends. Anybody up for a rousing round of “The Kevin Bacon Game” (Six Degrees)?
Is “friends” really the right word when you have so many that you don’t know most of their names?
David,
My Fan Page (FacebookEconomy.com) has tips listed on it for how to use FB for personal publishing. (Posted a while back so you may have to scroll thru discussions/posted items).
Im not the big fan of Facebook, but maybe i should try using it for a while..
Just 5,000 friends? I never knew there was a cap limit…
Thats nice would love fo have in fb 5000 friends :D
Its incredible how fast you actually can get friends. And incredible how many people you actually know…
I joined facebook a week ago, and I have already 70 friends, all people I know from before. And I haven’t been searching for people yet, that is only other people finding me.
Darren How many firends you had in Facebook – http://www.vhxn.com
I’m looking forward to the day that they allow you to let different groups of friends see different parts of your profile. From what I’ve read it seems that will be coming up in 2008. It will help those of us who have real life friends on Facebook as well as another set of internet-type friends.
I have to agree – I don’t “friend’ on facebook, myspace, etc. unless we know each other, or are at least in some of the same circles. Even then an on-line friend isn’t necessarily a real friend. Maybe I’ll never have 5000 “friends” or even 500 – but if you have to start managing your friends (on-line or real) you might need to better quantify.
I guess they’d never take my suggestion of acquaintances and friends to differentiate – of course that might be insulting to some.
This is great for me. I accept everyones request, but the people I don’t know (or don’t trust) I add as a limited friend. Now I can group the ones I don’t know together, the ones I know from online (twitter, etc.), the ones from middle school, and the ones from high school. This is great! :)
5,000??? The standard statistic puts the circle of acquaintances at an average of 150 people. I have 244 friends at Facebook and figure that’s a handful to manage. I’m not sure how you’d keep current with 5,000. The Friends List is going to be handy for separating my personal friends from my work connections.
I’m going to have to try this. I’ve been using InnerCircle for a bit, and it’s fairly useful.
kinda glad I turned down a job offer that was planning to build an FB app like this.
Finally a great feature comes in handy, no more poking in the next couple hours
No, I don’t have 5k friends and hope I never will frankly. I found this application very easy to use. After setting it up, I whizzed through it dividing my peeps into different groups. This has been helpful in getting an overview of the people I do business with. Before this I used an app called inner-circle (which just sounds super pretentious).
I’ve read the 150 estimate for the ultimate number of friends you can really have within a social circle. I am above 100 now, keeping it limited to real life people, and I have to say there are at least 100 people more who I regularly search for and would like to add.
I resisted adding Facebook, but did so in September when someone invited me who I wouldn’t have been in contact with otherwise.
I have to say, my friends list is hardly unmanageable, but Facebook does need to develop stronger strategies for categorizing users and maximizing and limiting abilities when appropriate.
Personally I would be fine to never receive another Fun Wall or Super Wall post again in my life. Some of those applications have the value of a chain letter forward, while others are quite simple and creative, such as the Growing Gifts application (my favorite).
There is a reason why we look to Facebook for the future of social media. Their strategy and value has much to offer those of us looking to expand in that direction and caring about where it will lead.
This could be a good tool, thank you as always for the tips. They say that demographically more and more thirty plus folks are going to Facebook … which I can understand, as graphically MySpace is headache-inducing.
I use facebook only for personal family use. I have read about the use of facebook for marketing but don’t know what the strategy is. With Stumble Upon, I understand what is happening. I guess the idea is to be an influencer.
sorry, I borrowed your title “Managing Facebook Friends” and I’ve got a discussion goin’ on a Facebook Note:
http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=6462244157&ref=mf
I just use facebook and twitter to drive traffic to my blog. and that’s quite help. I just added some people that i don’t even know so i can invite them to join my group before they visit my blog.
Bobby
http://www.inspiration-inbox.com