Can Anyone Be Your Facebook Friend?

I like this article over at Mashable (big surprise, I must link to them 4 times a day). Anyway, it lays down some good points why FaceBook needs to stop being Twitter. This is true for me, I may follow several thousand people on Twitter, but I have only around a 100 friends on Facebook. Why? Because FaceBook is for my friends and family. I even treat LinkedIn differently, I have many more people I’m connected with on LinkedIN. They’re all different services and I know FaceBook may be trying to capitalize on the MicroBlog trend, but it’s not the same thing. Anyway:

From: Mashable: Facebook () friends are pretty much only my real life friends and closest coworkers. When it comes to some other services, such as Digg (), I’ve let pretty much anyone be my friend, but sometimes I feel it’s better if I restrict my online friendships to match my real life connections.

I do this for one simple reason: Facebook is too valuable for me. If I have hundreds or thousands of friends, the service simply isn’t that useful; I get bombarded with too many status updates, and after a while I simply stop caring. I haven’t yet determined the sweet spot for the ideal number of friends on Facebook, but I’m pretty sure that – for me – it’s under 100.

Of course, Facebook is just one example; as our Adam Ostrow had shown in a recent post, by tweaking Facebook custom friend lists you can make sure that you don’t see stuff you don’t want to see, and by tweaking the privacy options you can hide your personal details from certain groups of Facebook friends. However, Facebook is just one social media site among hundreds, and not all of them offer such detailed customizing options.

On Twitter, I’m a bit more relaxed, and I follow several hundred people. But even there I’d rather have 100 relevant friends than 10000 random ones. It’s simply practically impossible to actively follow that many…

More:

See full article: http://mashable.com/2009/03/30/facebook-friend/?disqus_reply=7632173#comment-7632173