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I just finished reading an article by Dr. Mani titled “Building Relationships Using Digital Tools“. He mentions several online resources, including at least one that I need to look more into (”With a memory like mine, I say a regular prayer of thanks for reminder services and autoresponders. Do these reminders salvage, even deepen, relationships? You bet!”). But it’s later on in his post that he mentions something that I’ve been thinking about for a while now:

For too many ‘marketing minded’ individuals, the size of their MySpace network or Twitter followers or Facebook contact group seems an important measure of their ’success’ with social media use. Just as your bank balance is a poor index (taken in isolation) of your ’success’ in life, your network size alone isn’t reflective of your relationships..

Just a couple days ago, I was discussing this same thing with Allan, a friend I’ve mentioned before. Since Allan has been using Facebook for a while, I had wondered if he shared my opinion of the friend list on there. See, on Facebook, you can have 5000 friends. The thing that I’ve noticed though is that because you can have so many friends, there’s not much concern who you add as a friend. It’s easy to befriend anyone who asks, without having any kind of relationship with them before hand.

I have a hard time with that kind of “friendship.” Even online, friends mean something to me, and although I am horrible at frequent communication with anyone (even this blog is proof of that), each friend on my list is valuable to me.

I’ll be honest. I’ve fussed about the size of SU’s friend list before. It’s difficult to go from being able to add anyone you want to a list, to only being able to choose 200 people. If you use Facebook, consider your SU friends as your Top Friends on Facebook.

One of the things that being limited to 200 friends does, is make you update your friends list occasionally. On Facebook, unless you’re amazingly social and somehow have close to the 5000 friends limit, there’s not a lot of reason to get rid of friends usually.

On SU, your choice in friends helps determine what stumbles you receive. Picking friends who have common interests will help you receive stumbles that are interesting to you. Also, having someone as a friend allows you to send pages of interest to them, and allows them to send interesting pages to you. If your interests aren’t similar, you are losing an important way of sharing back and forth.

With the addition of the “Recent reviews” section, your friends most recent posts are listed for you to see. There are several great benefits of this section, as I mentioned here, but one drawback I’ve noticed is that it can also bring people’s differences to the forefront. It’s easier to see political, religious, or any other ideological differences when it’s put on your page every time someone write a new review.

Occasionally, people go inactive on SU. I know, it’s sad, but true. An inactive friend is still taking up one of your friend spots though, so depending on how long they’ve been gone, and how many free spaces you have, removing them is sometimes your best option. The nice thing is that you can always readd them if they return to SU later.

And finally, you will occasionally lose friends (and fans) because they request that the developers cancel their account.

So now I’d love to hear from you. What are your thoughts on the 200 person friend limit on SU? Does it affect who you add as a friend?
What are your requirements for dropping a friend? And finally, what are your thoughts on on-line friends? Are they as valuable as people you know face-to-face?

Tags: Dropped Friends, Friends, StumbleUpon, SU