Maybe some fans will become friends, but the connection will feel more like it does on Twitter.

And then for someone in your situation, you could easily convert friends to fans — I doubt anyone would feel as much zing from that as simply being unfriended.

Wasn’t groups supposed to be the big thing to solve this kind of problem (and more) in a more algorithmic way?

Maybe some fans will become friends, but the connection will feel more like it does on Twitter.

And then for someone in your situation, you could easily convert friends to fans — I doubt anyone would feel as much zing from that as simply being unfriended.

Wasn’t groups supposed to be the big thing to solve this kind of problem (and more) in a more algorithmic way?

First, bite the bullet and set up a fan page. Even if you don’t think of yourself as a brand, that’s the way that Facebook works.

Second, send a message to your 5000 friends and tell them to join the fan page in X days.

Third, after x days plus a few have elapsed, start deleting friends unless you recognize the name.

Not only does this remove the need for you to migrate everyone, since they’ll migrate themselves, but it also allows you to prune the list somewhat. Perhaps 1000 of the people aren’t even active on Facebook any more.

I use a simple approach. I limit myself to 200 connections on Facebook. I’m at 193 right now. When I get to 200 and someone wants to friend me I have to decide who I should kick out.

Adam

Thank you very much John,

EGO

EGO

5.000 is not enough, everybody knows that a network’s value increases by the squre of its nodes’ number, and FB should be competent enought o figure that out.

I want to be able to reach, and to be reached by as many people as possible; the ones neither of us want to be reached by have all the skills and tools it takes to smirk at our obsolete and illusory concepts of privacy; and I regularly find in my mailbox messages I have never opened but some unknown eyes have accessed before me, new friends I never invited to join my network but who have “accepted” my FBF request, and more of this kind of stuff.

What bothers me more is the equally idiotic limit on FB 300 groups; I get 10 or more invitations a day from groups which I am interested in, run by people I know in real life or at least should be able to look forward to meeting, and I am forced to ignore them because the alternative is sspending hours wading with FS’s clunky software, like watching paint dry, waiting for data I don’t need to load so I can leave a group I really want to stay in to join the next one.

The alternative is, and many do just that, to have multiple accounts and perhaps it can be done when sitting at two or more computers, never in an Internet cafe somewhere else, but yet losing the ability of linking certain people in your network to certain others because the latter are part of a different account, thus missing the key feature of social networking.

As long as I am here please allow me to mention a last, very irritating bug: I am writing a long message to somebody when suddenly a chat window opens, grabs that text continuation and, if I was not looking at the screen and hit return at the sentence’s end, sends it all to an unintended recipient, maybe in a language (s)he is not yet gifted with.

The worst part is that in that process, the whole message I was writing disappears and has to be started from scratch.

Then there is the bullying part: I am regularly informed by FB itself that they have found x, y or z whom I might know, and often enough I really do; when I send them a FBF request I add the video link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjD1zsvCH64

to my interview at Picnic2008 as a verification tool, then I get warnings that according to them I am engaging in spamming behavior and risk account suspension, which would destroy precious and irreplaceable correspondence archives.

Why must FB spit in the plate it eats from? Its most precious resource is us.

Eliahu Gal-Or – the Pizza Rebbe

pizzarebbe@gmail.com