From the Washington Post
May 23, 2008
Spud Web
By Steven Levy
The songwriter Buzzy Linhart said, "You've got to have friends." Indisputable. But 5,000 friends? Questionable. The seeming excessiveness is part of the reason the social-networking site Facebook caps the number of friends any person can gather at that lofty figure....
... But such online linking has deep social implications, and as one's friend list grows, so do problems. People judge each other by whom they list as friends. Inevitably, human noise finds its way into a collection of friends because people tend to cave in and agree to friendship when asked by someone they barely know or don't know at all. In real life, we are spared the explicitness of a bald request to be a friend, but there's no such luck online -- even ignoring someone's friend request doesn't gloss over the fact that you're rejecting him or her. "It's socially awkward, and very hard to draw the line," says danah boyd, a researcher at the School of Information at the University of California at Berkeley....
... Not surprisingly, hand-wringing about dealing with all these online friends is the province of a generation that grew up in the physical world. People under 25 seem to have painlessly adapted to these new rules, however unwritten. "Kids have gotten over this," boyd says. "As a teenager, you can't reject your friends at school, but you won't wind up having 5,000 friends, either."...