Facebook Sucks, Dave Winer says

The 5,000 friend limit may suck for you, but how many other people are bumping against that limit? If that’s your primary reason for saying that Facebook sucks, then I think that you are not accurately reflecting the way most people are using Facebook. Granted, we may all want to have 5,000+ friends at some point in the future, but as of today, I don’t think that’s an issue for very many people. If it were, I think the folks there would be making it more of a priority to resolve. I’ve been a reader of your blog for a long time and I’m kinda tired of your harping on this one issue about Facebook as it is not (currently) a drawback for the vast majority of its users – mostly you.

Mac Beach: it’s not the first time I’ve written about this issue. Thanks for reading.

Robert: Facebook is intended for real people. “Robert Scoble” isn’t a real person anymore… he’s a public identity. Similarly, a business isn’t a real person… it may be an entity for tax purposes, but it ain’t a person.

For that sorta thing, you want MySpace. It happily embraces the notion of “people-as-marketing-tools”, and as Tila Tequila can attest, you can have way, way more than 5,000 friends.

@address book discussion – yes the API is there to pull your profile. I guess no one has done it because Facebook devs don’t want you to leave Facebook?

I love the way people take a free personal service and say it doesn’t scale to business/enterprise proportions. It’s no more Facebook’s fault for not monetising their community ‘properly’ than it is Scoble’s fault for not monetising his database. And seriously, anyone who wants enterprise services (5000 plus) should pay enterprise rates for enterprise scaleability. ie. you get what you pay for, the new economy notwithstanding.

Do you ever disagree with Winer? I guess you don’t want him on your bad side or he’ll turn on you faster than Dr Jekyll.

So Facebook is now not the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, as you had been preaching for the last few months?

Your famed edge-case temper-tantrums not working? Wait til Ballmer gets a piece, then you can complain to Microsoft.

“it’s NOT a reasonable limit. I know businesses with hundreds of thousands of contacts. Chris Pirillo has that many too for his email newsletters.”

Yes, it IS a reasonable limit. Who the hell needs to have all the people they send an email newsletter to in their address book? You generally have specialised software to send emails like that. Do people really administer lists like that using the GMail interface?

Let me put it another way:

Let X be the number of people who could use GMail. Let Y be the number of people who ‘need’ more than 10,000 people in their contacts list.

So the proportion of users this limit matters to is Z = Y/X.

I’m guessing Z tends to zero. Or, in fact, is zero for all intents and purposes.

You need to realise that “me, and a couple of other guys I know, and that’s totally just off the top of my head!” is an edge case, and is unlikely to be addressed any time soon. It’s why having 5000+ friends in Facebook isn’t sensible either. It isn’t what it is designed to do.

In other words, “reasonable limit” means “for the vast majority of people”, not “good enough for ME”.

Can I say, told ya so?

Mind you I only have about 1500 contacts, not friends, in Outlook, so 5000 wouldn’t be a problem. It’s the “walled garden” aspect that ruled it out for me.

@satish:
Why not just create a Facebook group?

@Robin Capper: totally agreed. That’s the big kicker for me.

I’m also rapidly approaching the 5k limit (at 4384 now) and will soon find it as frustrating as Scoble.

the talk of fb being address book 2.0 is interesting – my company (Jangl) actually built an app inside fb called “Phonebook”. Check it out, it provides you an at-a-glance view of all your friends, a phone number for them (a virtual one that is), and other call control settings. No comment on the 5K limit – I don’t have that many “friends”, for better or worse

THE GREAT AND POWERFUL DAVE WINER SPEAKS! The Tuesday Night Tech Show loves you Scoble!

>Chris Pirillo has that many too for his
>email newsletters.

I used to have about 2 million people on my e-mail newsletter lists before Yahoo decided to turn them all over to that hacker in Poland.

@Satish: if you’re serious about that Facebook developer thing, we’d be willing to take it on .

And @Scobleizer: what did you expect when you started friending everyone regardless of whether or not they’re your real-life friend? That said, I agree that the 5,000 friend limit sucks. Would you pay for more capacity?

@Everyone who things that 5k FB friends and 10k Gmail contacts is unreasonable: Must I remind you that you are using a “free” (as in beer) service that you signed/clicked-yes-to an EULA with? If the product that you have not made any investment in is not good enough for you, get another!
FB calls them “friends” for a reason, and I am pretty confident that you do not have 5000 actual friends. If you are only using FB/Gmail as a distribution list for newsletters, etc, and it’s not good enough for you, purchase a specialized program that will manage that many contacts for you with no limit. Or, as mentioned above, just start a group and accomplish the same things. I’m sure you would have no problem getting all 5000 of your “friends” to join up.

webswarms will never limit the number of Others you may be in contact with

I am a MySpace man, not a facebook fan.

In addition to the problems cited by Winer and the others in these comments, Facebook is rather unfriendly to those of us who are older. I noted this when I went to look for friends in the college list and the dropdown graduation date menu only went back to 1970. Not much help to someone who graduated from college in 1963. Fortunately for us older types, saggingfacebook.com looks ready to fill the void.