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May 09, 2008
Michael Arrington Made my Day. Facebook will soon allow us to have more than 5,000 friends. (via TechCrunch)
TechCrunch: Facebook To Lift 5,000 Friends Limit
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During the past year as I became consumed by Facebook, Facebook has become my portal for business communication. An increasing number of my business conversations have been taking place inside of Facebook. A cornerstone of this strategy has been my ability to continue to add new contacts as they join the Facebook community.
On March 14, 2008 my strategy of using Facebook for business became challenged when I first reached the 5,001 friends limit. And while I thought it was cool to be at 5,001 friends, that feeling lasted only a few minutes when someone told me they tried to add me as a friend and they got a message that in effect “Jeff has too many friends.” (Humm...How could any ever really have too many friends?)
Back in March I reached out to my contacts at Facebook for help since I was told by Mark Zuckerberg back in November that “5,000 was only a number” and I was lead to believe it was easy to get past this limit.
And then I received the following message from Facebook:
“So it turns out that we're not able to increase your friend limit past 5,000 :( We won't always have this limit, but it is that way for technical reasons now.
One of the goals with launching Facebook Pages was to address this type of need for people who have a large fan base, such as politicians, celebrities...and you! We figure most people don't have more than 5,000 real friends, so Pages is an alternative option for people and businesses who use the site for commercial purposes. This could be an option for you until we address the Profile Page friend limit. There is a mechanism that helps convert a Profile to a Page. Let me know if you want to do that.”
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Since the middle of March, when I had the time, I spent time reviewing my friends and removed some so I could make room for new contacts. This continues to be an ackward and time consuming process. And to date, I haven’t been able to find the time to remove more than 400-500 people. At the moment I have 422 outstanding friend requests and I’m not able to add anyone new until I start removing people again and this is something I just don’t want to be doing.
I’m glad I resisted the offer to convert my profile into a Facebook page since I would have given up some of the personal nature of my profile. I just hope that the 5,000 person limit is removed sooner rather than later.
Tags: Facebook, Social Media, Michael Arrington,Jeff Pulver
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Posted by jeff on May 9, 2008 04:04 PM | Permalink
Additional resources: Internet TV Online Guide @ Network2.tv | Voice on the Net Conference | Video on the Net Conference
Comments
I think you should hope that Facebook will actually remove the limit and not just increase it to 10,000 or something similar.
Well, adjusting the limit to 100,000 should at least give you a whole year free of removing friends to make room for new ones... :-)
Posted by: Eliram at May 10, 2008 06:43 PM