Facebook, why should I only have 5000 friends?

5000 friends... I cannot accept any friend anymore on Facebook. In a way it is good news, because I won't have to go from now and then and click like a stupid machine to accept them. Now what does it mean? I remember all the messages I got "I would be happy to be your Facebook friend even though you have not met". Weird, right? I never refused a friend on Facebook but I never invited any from my gmail contacts etc either. I mean I have never imported my contacts or friends from anywhere else to boost the Facebook number, I only accepted people who friended me. Just because I felt it was very rude to refuse somebody who wants to be your friend, how can you refuse?

Why do we care? Does it give a sense of your popularity online? Maybe. It is a game, like when my kids measure themselves with other kids at school. Let's be a kid for a moment, Robert Scoble and Leo Laporte have both hit that number a few months ago, while if I was a kid I would have been very happy to hit it before my friend (real friend) Jason who "only has 4968 friends". I love it in fact. It would only take Jason a tweet to hit it too (Jason has many more followers than me on Twitter) but just the fact that I hit 5000 before him is kind of fun and lets me tease him a bit, see below. Jason, I love you and yes, you are much more popular on the web don't be pissed at me :)

So kids stuff yeah. Ok. It is also good "marketing", it means you can send or share stuff to your 5000 friends how cool is that. Except that if you send crap to them they unfriend you. Not too much on Facebook whose feed is not very intrusive but much more on Twitter. Have a look at Scoble on Twitter. Robert has 26785 followers on Twitter and is following 21117 because he asked Twitter to turn off his "autofollow" feature (anybody that followed him was automatically followed by Robert). He was always explaining that he loved to follow that many people and that it even "defined" him except that there is a moment when you can't even follow anything because it is too much noise.

What is a friend? That is the real question. Someone you can wake up at 3AM because you have a real problem? Or that you could crash suddenly in the house in the middle of the night because something bad happened to you? Sure, that is a real friend. Try that question on your friends and you will see there are not that many left. That is probably the definition of a very very close friend. I would say I have no more than 10 like these. I could probably crash in many friends houses, but I would not feel that good in more than 10 of them because I would not have done anything for them myself. A friend relationship is both ways...

Having said that I feel the numbers are quite consistent from one service to another, here is my friend count:

-5000 Facebook Friends
-8164 Twitter followers
-824 YouTube subscribers (less people follow video)
-4208 Friendfeed subscribers
-2000 people participate at LeWeb conference and 216 signed up early and allow me to book that huge room :)
-25476 subscribed to my Feedburner in French (going down), 5410 in english (going up) and about 500 to my itunes feed

If you average the above numbers, you can say my "community" is around 5000 people worldwide. That is probably right and has been for a while, with a few years of blogging.

My community is fantastic and after my family, it is what matters the most to me. It does not matter because of how many, but because of its quality. It matter by how much feedback I am getting every day. My community lets me build seesmic for example, because I would have never come up with it that way without all the feedback. If you take everything away from me, I will still feel surrounded by my community and I know I can count on it.

Can I wake up my 5000 facebook friends at 3AM in the night and crash at their house? Probably not. But I can count on their permanent feedback and help. I know that and I want to thank you all for this.

This is why even though I like so much my friends at Facebook (read: my friends who work at Facebook or created it) I would really like that they remove this 5000 friends limit because I do not think they can decided what is the friend limit you should have. In fact, they get it so well that they created groups of friends and let you categorize them. But what is the point if you can't add any? Please, remove this!

Anyway, was this worth a blog post like this? Probably, it is worth thinking about your online friends all the time. They give it back to you. So thank you all for helping me so much in anything I do and being my friends.