Which of your FB friends has the most friends...

[carolinaviking]

I just got a friends invite from someone who I do not remember. The name was vaguely familiar so I checked the mutual friends and it turns out we had 28 mutual friends from my high-school, so it seems she is a legitimate member of my past. What really shocked me was when I noted her number of total friends. I thought my niece at the University of Alabama had a lot of FB friends at just under 900 (the most I have seen so far), but this 43-year-old woman has 3,179 FB friends!!

So, what is the most number of friends you have seen on FB? And perhaps even more important, does the number affect your view of that person?

Generally, I tend to think a low number - below 100 - means that the person is too busy to sit in front of the computer keeping up with the latest fad-of-the-month social website and is probably out hang gliding right now. But I'll admit there have been rare occasions when I thought that person actually had a low FB friend count because that person lacked social skills or was otherwise unpopular for a reason. Usually, these were people I knew to some extent.

When I see people with loads of friends - 300+ - I figure they are padding their numbers because they don't have a lot of *real* friends. But again, I admit that some of my FB friends with a high friend count are socialites who attract friends in real life like flames attract moths.

But when I saw this woman who I don't know at all with over 3,000 FB friends, I had no idea what to think. One crazy factor is that she seems to have loads of FB apps that I have never seen but she doesn't have any photo listed other than her profile avatar! At least, no photos I could look at without accepting her friend request. I can't help but think this woman leads a very, very rich life surrounded by legions of adoring fans and there is a warm meal awaiting her in every major city in the western hemisphere. Seriously.

I have not accepted the friends request, yet. I am going to contact some of our mutual friends to find out who she is, first.

[Blitz]

I have one old friend, er, acquaintance, from highschool, whom I haven't seen since I was 17. He tracked me down (turns out he is a private detective now, and FB has been very very good to him in that regard....) so I added him. Last time I saw him he actually had kidnapped me to an Amway meeting. At any rate, he had about 900 friends, and my first thought was that he was building his own power base. Over 3000, ridiculous.

[Moozeylicious]

don't you think the reason she has so many FB friends is because she happily adds everyone and anyone (no disrespect)?

I find there are those that like to keep their nearest and dearest so low numbers on FB, then there is the middle of the road kind that have n&d but also a few FoF (in the 100s) and the last kind is school kids or those that add everyone because they feel the higher the number the more popular they look.

[carolinaviking]

Yeah, Moozey, I think high numbers often indicate padding the friends list. But 3,000? I have gotten a total of maybe 50 requests from total strangers in the past 1.5 years on FB. How could she get 3,000 strangers' requests? Unless she is the one doing the requesting, in which case, a lot of people on the receiving end of those requests were desperate for strange friends.

I also agree that usually I notice that the higher the FB friends number, the lower the age, with college kids having the highest numbers. She definitely bucks that trend.

Nearest and dearest? I don't see that very often. I am on several very small friends lists and am neither near nor dear to that person. I have tried to prune my list a couple of times and cannot get it down below 200, even though the majority of my FB friends have not heard from me beyond the initial "OMG Hey! How are you?" friend request response seven months ago. I only keep them on there because I like to check that they are still alive and kicking once a year and figure they do the same with me.

[Moozeylicious]

3,000 is more than some groups have following them! She certainly has a lot of friends and I can definitely understand why you are wondering who she is and why she wants to add you.

OK nearest and dearest isn't the right words but I couldn't think of how else to call describe all those hanger-ons. My FB friends are predominately people I don't get to see often so it is one of my main ways of keeping in contact with them. When I lose an FB friend I generally know who it is but thankfully I don't get culled often and when I do it is sometimes because they find my statuses a little to blue even though they know I am only jesting

[Blitz]

Maybe someone should start Acquaintance Book.

[Fjord]

Just checked a mate of mine and he has just over 4½ thousand. But he is a world-famous-in-South-Africa stage and TV celebrity. He even remembers Genni (but she refuses to be his FB friend).

He likes me. He really, really likes me! He is honestly one of my best mates and still owes me a bottle of poppers and a tube of lube he stole from my home from the last time he passed out/stayed over after a party.

I know, too, that more than 4,000 of them are on limited profile.

We have 224 friends in common, out of the most recent post-cull 597 folk I have.

[Gilly]

Facebook might give us the ability to have thousands of friends but it does nothing to expand how many we keep in real life, an Oxford University study has found.

For humans appear incapable of maintaining more than about 150 active relationships, according to Robin Dunbar, a professor of evolutionary anthropology.

Article

[Feste]

I suspect your friend request is from someone who is heavily into one of the FB gaming Apps like Mafia Wars - the bigger the personal Mafia, the more power you have in the game. A common tactic is to add other players from FB as "friends" to build the size of one's personal mafia. Simple as that, and fairly common behaviour for the role play addict. I would hope the majority of those mafia friends are segmented into a privacy list, but I know a guy that doesn't bother and he too has thousands of people in his friends list. Foolish, in my view, but to each their own.

The human mind has the capacity to interact with, on average, 150 personal connections in any kind of meaningful way. People that think they are the exception to that rule are kidding themselves. It's brain science and we humans are only 3 times as good as chimps in this regard.

I start to wonder about people with over 250 "friends" - they clearly, based on scientific research about the brain and human social interaction, are not really "friends" with nearly half of their friends list.

[Feste]

Originally Posted by Gilly

Article

Exactly!

[Mimsie]

Originally Posted by Feste

I suspect your friend request is from someone who is heavily into one of the FB gaming Apps like Mafia Wars - the bigger the personal Mafia, the more power you have in the game...

Exactly! I have a friend who has somewhere around 3,500 FB friends, but that's only due to Mafia Wars. He has since opened up another profile for himself, where there are no game friends, just real friends.

Many of my younger friends that have several hundred FB friends are still in College, or just graduated, so they have pretty much everyone from their school as friends.

Another type of my friends that have a lot of friends are the ones that are more of less celebrities, or run in those circles.

Just my take on it.

[Trocadero]

CV add me !

[origamitea]

I don't have Facebook, but a friend of mine told me a girl who we went to school with has 5000 friends plus. She was a typical popular girl at school and she never uttered one interesting word to me, but something seems to attract people to her.

I doubt she got that amount by randomly adding people either. I don't really get it. Unless everyone she meets when she's out asks for her facebook or something.

Although, when I had myspace about 2 years ago, I couldn't believe all those "whore train" things, where basically if you're "pretty" by this myspace groups standards you would get put on the whore train bulletin so that people would add you. Mind boggles. Social networking's fine and all that but I always find it a tad weird when people's friends are in the thousands and they're not famous or anything like that.

[focusonevil]

I try to stick as close to 100 as possible, with only 12 people whom I haven't met personally, but who are friends with my homies. I find the high "friend" count for certain people mind-boggling, even like 300 is a lot to me. I've only received a few requests from strangers and I mostly ignored them except in 1 case, where I really DID meet the person 20 years ago. I really like to use FB mainly to keep in touch with my friends in different countries and not for networking / business and such. When people friend-request me that I don't know, I check their profile for how many friends they have and if they appear to be pesky networkers I don't even bother replying.

[Zoot]

I have to agree with some others... its got to be one of those silly apps! I have some friends where they create fake profiles just to add themselves as friends and increase.... something. I'm not sure what as I don't play any of the apps on there (just take the occasional quiz because I think they are fun and silly).

I think this is true for most people... You have the "core" that you interact regularly with, and then the others are ones that you check in with every so often and visa versa. Then there are those that you knew from way back in the day.... either you reconnect on a deeper level with them or its just a "well, isn't that nice for them" kind of thing, but there's really no interaction.

I do find the friend collectors, whether for increasing their power in an app or just their self esteem/feeling of popularity, to be strange.... but like Feste said.... to each their own!

[infinity]

I have around 200 friends, and I am regularly paring mine down. Sometimes I meet people on the net or in real life, add them for a while and then realize that I am not likely to have any other interactions with them and remove them. All the 200 or so I have now I actually know in real life fairly well, or they are members here on LiS. If I didn't regularly cull them, I would have about 5 or 6 hundred. They are like half kronor coins or pennies, you just seem to accumulate them.

Darkhorse here on LiS has over 1500, but for the most part they are people that he has met through his work, and because he is a gregarious sort that meets lots of people. He is a networking lover I think. He works in the aid community in communications and meets a hell of a lot of people, so I wouldn't think he is one of those collectors. I think it really does have a lot to do with what you do for work or play for some people with large numbers of friends.

[Rykno]

I was up to around 750 due to MW's but then removed almost all gaming friends. got to know a few outside the gaming world, so kept them. under 300 (only 15 or so MW friends left)

but of those I played with 9 out of 10 had over 4000 friends.

I have some popular friends, that have well over 1500 FB friends. Greek house people, cheerleaders, body buiilders and people who post half naked pics tend to have the most friends.

[fondacey]

I've just over 450 and took a peek at the list. Going through it I think I could easily cull 10% who are people who either I don't really know or care about, but they belong to networks of people I do care about (e.g. my relatives, club members, home town gang) and I am the kind of person who sees a friend of a friend as a friend (if needed).

It's like knowing a group of people via a friend whom you see at their regular gatherings. You enjoy their company, are quite happy to see them during these occasions but aren't ever going to call them to go out and have a beer without the mutual friend (not that you wouldn't enjoy it but that you just can't maintain that number of close friends like the article states.) So I keep them as FB friends because I indirectly interact with real friends via FB activity.

I think FB limits the number of FB friends to 5000. I have one friend who has 5000 mostly because he's a public figure and was quite active during the Philippine Typhoon Ondoy raising money and awareness etc. I "met" him via an email I sent to him about something he had written and then he has been very kind to help me out by giving info/tips/advice regarding some family things in the Philippines (and since he's not a direct relative that I know of) I have been grateful for his input knowing it's not biased.

Otherwise I know two or three friends who have in the 1000 range. They are either students or very active in a sport (skydiving) and skydivers are a chummy bunch. A good portion of my "sort of" knows come via skydiving but I do socialize with them regularly anyway.

[K-ugn]

Originally Posted by Blitz

Maybe someone should start Acquaintance Book.

I'm all for starting Contemptbook, but I'm afraid my connections would run into the thousands.

K-ugn (At 30+ and holding on FB, and refuse to go over 50. Very interesting who contacts you on FB, and why, and who you think would want to get in touch but doesn't, versus who you think would not want to get in touch... but does!)

[Tweeps]

I love analyzing FB friends lists! Think I only have one RL friend, or acquaintance rather, that has a friend count in the thousands. When I see a friend count that high, my first thought is this person has no interest in any kind of real social interaction. I've added quite a few people (or have been added) for games and apps, but I end up culling most of them at some point. I have to leave a few to keep it interesting.

[carolinaviking]

Originally Posted by K-ugn

Very interesting ... who you think would want to get in touch but doesn't, versus who you think would not want to get in touch... but does!)

Yeah, this is an interesting phenomenon. I have people contact me out of the blue that barely knew me in high-school/college and I wonder why. I feel kinda shitty if I don't accept them. Some I decline, anyway. Some of them were real assholes and they know I did not like them, so I wonder why they contact me now. I think it is their way of offering a *safe* olive branch for past wrongs. We post all friendly-like on each others walls and sort of build a strange friendship without actually saying, "hey, sorry for being an asshole back in 1984 and for stealing your girlfriend/beating you up/wrecking your motorcycle/letting you take the fall/whatever." Then the activity fizzles and we forget we are FB friends until we see them on the list during a semi-annual cull.

I am also curious as to why some really close friends from the past have not friended me. We have mutual friends and I post on those friends' walls frequently, whereas they never post on those friends' walls. Therefore, they see my posts but I never see that they exist on FB. They know I am here, but I don't really know they are here, unless I actively search my friends' FB friends list, which is a real pain in the ass. It makes me wonder...

[BobbyEwing]

I only have as many friends on FB as I can stalk at any one time.

[Arsenalgirl]

I reckon I've got around a hundred friends but I can't even think of a hundred people that I actually like. It doesn't add up. The word friends is a misnomer.

[José Maria]

Originally Posted by Arsenalgirl

I reckon I've got around a hundred friends but I can't even think of a hundred people that I actually like. It doesn't add up. The word friends is a misnomer.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/London...0970954?v=info

[Blitz]

Originally Posted by José Maria

http://www.facebook.com/pages/London...0970954?v=info

That's a fan page, not a regular individual's page. Lots of fan pages have way more than that.

[Blitz]

Originally Posted by José Maria

http://www.facebook.com/pages/London...0970954?v=info

Originally Posted by Blitz

That's a fan page, not a regular individual's page. Lots of fan pages have way more than that.

http://www.facebook.com/barackobama

[midwest]

i think only one or two of my friends on fb have friends lists in the thousands

the reason for that is that he is famous and insetad of starting a fan page he adds his fans as friends

the other one is the samesame reason

[fondacey]

Originally Posted by midwest

the reason for that is that he is famous and insetad of starting a fan page he adds his fans as friends

FB limits the number of friends you can have to 5000.

[fondacey]

Distant relatives of my mother's family name have started a Facebook page for that name. There are over 350 members already (no I don't plan on adding them unless I know them) though via the group I am now friends with the creator and an admin and I've been in touch with one other member. We're tracking down the origins and it's been super fun digging through the family via FB and Geni.com.

Funnily enough no one can recall the first name my mother's paternal grandfather while we have charted his siblings (complete with names)

So I'm enjoying getting to know strangers who are somewhat related to me.

[indigo]

I love seeing how connected my friends and I are with each other. Majority of my home friends know each other and even though some of us live miles apart the interaction is like sitting at someones house and chatting.

Same thing with friends from LiS. I love how we have "conversations" via comments, I have had some hysterical laughs from these.

Then there is the RW clan, Lynda, Karin and I have a thing for Robbie Williams, and it´s great what we find on the web and share with each other so we can all drool over our key boards.

I enjoy FB!! It keeps me in easy contact with family and friends around the globe.