=My friend sent me a friend request and it wont let her because it says i have too many friends.?

[Heaven]

I only have 427 friends. Other ppl have like 1,000 and up friends!! Y is it doing tht

[Mamoon Daniyal]

THE British anthropologist and Oxford professor Robin Dunbar has posed a theory that the number of individuals with whom a stable interpersonal relationship can be maintained (read: friends) is limited by the size of the human brain, specifically the neocortex. “Dunbar’s number,” as this hypothesis has become known, is 150.

Jennifer Daniel


Facebook begs to differ.

What would be an impressive, even exhaustive, number of friends in real life is bush league for Facebook’s high rollers, who have thousands. Other social networks use less-intimate terminology to portray contacts (LinkedIn has “connections,” Twitter has “followers”), but Facebook famously co-opted the word “friend” and created a new verb.

Friending “sustains an illusion of closeness in a complex world of continuous partial attention,” said Roger Fransecky, a clinical psychologist and executive coach in New York (2,894 friends). “We get captured by Facebook’s algorithms. Every day 25 new people can march into your living room. I come from a failed Presbyterian youth, and there was a part of me that first thought it was impolite not to respond. Then I realized I couldn’t put them all in a living room — I needed an amphitheater.”

Facebook discourages adding strangers as friends, adding that only a tiny fraction of its 400 million users have reached the 5,000 threshold, at which point Facebook wags its digital finger and says: That’s enough. The company cites behind-the-scenes “back-end technology” as the reason for the cutoff, implying that the system will implode at the sight of a 5,001st friend.

“You hit this limit, and you have to commit Facebook murder, or perhaps ‘culling’ would be a better word,” said Sreenath Sreenivasan (5,000), dean of student affairs at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. His page bears the admonishment, “FB will not let me add any more friends,” and he periodically posts a message asking some on his list to “unfriend” him.

What may seem surprising is that the subset of people with sizable lists is not limited to unemployed 20-somethings, commandeering tables at Starbucks and deluding themselves that they’re “networking,” social or otherwise. The high-users include plenty of grown-ups with real jobs and, seemingly, better things to do with their time than updating their “status” for strangers, former colleagues and camp buddies from 300 years ago.

“At one point, I arbitrarily decided that for every new friend I confirmed, I had to delete one, like people with small closets do with their clothes,” said Kurt Andersen (3,072), the host of “Studio 360” on public radio. “I devoted an entire weekend to going through them. But it made me feel like a 14-year-old girl: ‘I’ll be friends with you but not with you.’ ”

Facebook friends grow like kudzu for a variety of reasons, often personal or professional marketing — a proxy for the exchange of business cards (so old school). As in life, social networking lends itself to expanding social circles with like-minded people, so there are autologous Facebook cabals for foodies, literati, political junkies, perhaps gardeners, probably plumbers, definitely Civil War re-enactors (whose membership seems to be self-selected from former high-school audiovisual clubs).

Jeffrey Toobin, a CNN legal analyst, credits (or blames) the election of 2008 for his Brobdingnagian list. “During one of the many primary nights, there was a shot of me from behind in the studio,” said Mr. Toobin (5,000). “Some intrepid viewer did a freeze frame showing that I was on Facebook at the time, and put it on the Web to make fun of it. Fair enough, but that mockery went viral. I now have 1,500 people pending, and I feel like I’ve declared Facebook bankruptcy. It’s the 21st-century equivalent of ‘12:00’ flashing on my VCR.”

If Facebook is a place of indiscriminate musings and minutiae, where people report their every thought, mood, hiccup, cappuccino, increased reps at the gym or switch to a new brand of toothpaste, why not indiscriminate friendships? Why deny the little frisson of pleasure when your page proclaims you are “now friends with John Smith and 27 other people?”

Facebook’s announcements and “suggestions” for new friends help to fetishize those numbers, although few will admit to an ego-gratifying interest in attaining the mythical quota of 5,000, like the Ryan Bingham character of “Up in the Air,” who’s obsessed with reaching 10 million frequent flier miles.

As a metric for status or worth, Facebook has the ability to reduce its adult users to insecure teenagers, competing for high SAT scores or a seat at the cool kids’ cafeteria table.

Saying that it feels like a nerdy popularity contest, Chris Brogan (4,801), whose Boston company helps businesses use new media, added: “I went through school with little popularity, and no one was proud to be my friend. Now it’s a strange badge to wear.”


But he’s loath to take the route of a “fan”