Facebook To Lift 5,000 Friends Limit

[TechCrunch]

Facebook will soon remove a limitation that restricts users to no more than 5,000 friend connections, someone close to the company told us this week.

There are stories around why the limitation exists at all. The official reason is that Facebook wants to make sure that people only add “real” friends to their account, and the restriction is on the high end of the number of friends that any one person could reasonable have. The unofficial (and actual) reason: scaling problems made this necessary. I’ve heard this directly from Facebook employees, as have others.
But those scaling issues have been resolved, we hear from our source, and the cap will soon be lifted.

Facebook says that “less than 1,000″ users have 5,000 friends today. There are around 70 million active Facebook users, so the number of users who are affected is around one thousandth of a percent. But a disproportionate percentage of bloggers and press are at the limit, so the issue tends to get a lot more attention than it otherwise would.
High profile blogger Robert Scoble is among the 1,000 Facebook users who’ve hit the cap, and has complained about the restriction in the past.

Facebook says that they “Pages” feature is meant for people and brands that want to have a lot more “friends” than are allowed via normal accounts. An example is Barack Obama’s Facebook page, which currently shows 820,000 supporters.

But for many people, being a friend is much different than being a fan, and the level of interaction allowed is also significantly different. And the new Friends List feature, which allows users to classify and group friends, makes organization easier anyway.

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[David]

Awesome! Now I don't have to worry about hitting that limit anytime soon. With 300 friends, I was worried I'd be at almost 5,000 next month!

I always figured the limit was to prevent spamming. There is also a "friend add velocity" that you cannot exceed (and I have before).

[Tigerblade]

I currently have 83 "friends" listed on Facebook. I went through a few months ago and trimmed off as many random people as I could - people that I met once and haven't seen or talked to since.

I still have a fair number of people on there that I really don't consider "friends" at all. There are some people that I went to high school with (who I didn't like to begin with), etc. I turned down a request the other day from some girl who apparently went to my high school a year behind me, but whom I don't remember ever seeing.

Besides, there's always Dunbar's number.

[Jeff]

Nobody, not even Robert Scoble, has over 5,000 friends. This is a bad move by Facebook. They're going down the same path as Myspace.

[MrEggsalad]

Well this is good, now I can get updates from my entire school, everyone at the neighboring high school, all my family, all the people they interact with, that guy at the supermarket and his friends, the mailman, the ice cream shop....

Anyone who actually has 5k friends just simply MUST be randomly adding people, and that defeats the purpose of social networking. Social networking is to find out who is with who and you can meet other people through your own friends, and even doing that there still is a pretty small circle of people that you shouldn't go outside of.

[Rata2008]

Good news:-)