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by waleedka
6440 days ago
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When I see someone with 700 Facebook friends or more, my first thought is that they're most probably friend collectors. They either add every profile they come across, or they accept every invite they get (usually from other friend collector). For these people, the Facebook experience probably sucks because there is very little personality to it. And, obviously, he shouldn't have expected people to show up to meet someone they don't even know and have nothing in common with. |
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My facebook timeline:
-May 2004 College Friending (200 friends): I finish senior thesis. Am bored. Hear about facebook hitting Princeton. I check it out. It's cute. I add my college friends. Zuck friends me as an early adopter. This probably gets me to 200 friends: the 40 or so people I considered friends, the 100 or so people I'd spent time with and then another 60 were people I knew through students groups, church or student government stuff. I believe at this point I had a detailed profile, was sharing my dorm room phone number and e-mail address.
-September 2004-August 2006 (200 friends): I worked as a summer camp counselor for three summers during time off from my first job, as a college admissions officer at Princeton. Facebook opened to HS students so my campers and fellow counselors wanted to be friends. It was at this time that I stopped sharing so much personal info, having begun to see FB as my personal address book, rather than an intimate conversation. I probably added another 200 friends during this period.
-September 2006-March 2008 Grad School (200 friends): I started at Northwestern J-school and we all friended eachother up on FB as an overture to getting to know one another. Subsequent arriving groups of students also friended me. It's not a huge program and networking is everything in journalism. This was probably another 300 people, 60% of them are people I've worked with. The rest are people I've had class with or corresponded with in some capacity. Being able to get on the horn with a reporter at Time or Newsweek is just plain useful.
- Late adopter pickup (150 friends) - Over the last two years or so, as Facebook has become ubiquitous, people I knew in middle school and high school have surfaced to friend me. Even a few from elementary school. During a moment of absolute boredom, I tracked down my 6th grade crush on FB and friended her. So FB became a bit of a link to my past. Friending these people would prompt a short exchange of updates, followed by radio silence as we followed from afar. It's fun to know I've got ooooold friends in places like Turkey and London.
- March 2008 - Present, Readers, local bloggers in Chicago (150 friends): The last phase of this has been recently as I've published an online magazine about Chicago news and politics. Readers have friended me as have other bloggers and writers in Chicago.
At this point, while I share about 200 photos on my profile (none sketchy in the least) I haven't really updated it in years. It lists my professional background and interests, and that's about it. I don't go on there a whole lot, maybe once a week for 20 minutes or so.
That's how I have 900 friends, for what it's worth.