Facebook as Probiotic: I Now Have 5,000 Friends

This morning, at 9:27am, I reached that magical, if mythical, Facebook manna milestone of having 5,000 friends!  That’s the limit.  Facebook won’t let me have more than 5,000 friends.  I’ve maxed out my Facebook social network. Now what?

No, I don’t intimately know all my 5,000 Facebook friends, but we do share thoughts and ideas from around the world, and we are connected and no longer alone.

I don’t share many personal details of my life on Facebook. In fact, I basically use my status updates to automagically promote new articles in the Boles Blogs Network, and I also promote outstanding Blues videos I find on YouTube — and yet, despite all that sterility of sharing — I still have 5,000 friends.

Getting to 5,000 Facebook friends was a fascinating experience. It was easier to move from 2,500 friends to 5,000 than it was to go from zero to 2,500. I thought I’d hit that 5,000 friends limit in June, but it took to the end of August to get there.

Over the years, I have deleted a lot of Facebook friends along the way.  I also have an extensive ban list.  I didn’t accept every friend request.  If I’d kept all my friends and if I accepted every friend suggestion and friend request, I likely would’ve hit the 5,000 limit a year ago.

The Facebook friends count is volatile as it jumps by a count of ten and then drops by ten throughout the day.  One moment, you have 4,900 friends and the next time you update the page moments later, you’ve dropped down to 4,890 friends — that makes adding new friends a bit perilous and hard to predict because Facebook is sensitive if you try to add too many friends too fast, or if you accept too many new friendships too quickly.

Facebook will not hesitate to warn you against — or even ban you from — adding too many friends.  I don’t understand why.

I currently have 7,089 LinkedIn “connections” — not “friends,” I guess, according to them — and I’m much more distant from those people than I am on Facebook, even though my updates on LinkedIn are the same as what I share on Facebook.

Is Facebook friendlier than LinkedIn?  Yes.

Is LinkedIn more powerful and far-reaching than Facebook?  Yes.

Why do I prefer Facebook to LinkedIn?  There is a warmth and deep feeling of comity that Facebook has and LinkedIn lacks.

LinkedIn is sterile and antiseptic.

Facebook is probiotic.

I don’t know if Facebook will ever raise their 5,000 friend limit — it has always struck me as strange that they determine, and not us, how many friends we are allowed to have — yet LinkedIn has no “connections” limit and I have zero investment in seeing that number rise above 7,000, even though I know it will.

UPDATE:
I now have 5,001 friends!  I wonder how high that “over-the-limit” number can go before bad things start to happen?  I think I’ve seen others who have something like 5,009 friends or so but that number never lasted very long.  The Facebook system always presses down to the 5,000 friend limit.