You're not a "friend whore" just becuase you have a lot of friends

I am not a huge user of facebook (although my wife is) but I just read a great post from Robert Scoble on why their 5,000 friend limit is, in his opinion, unnecessary and restrictive. What I like about Scoble's post is that even irrespective of facebook, it's the best defense I've ever read for having a large online social network.

I have many personal friends who simply don't understand or actually frown upon having significanty more "virtual friends" than real ones (the "friend whore" accusation). I've never really been able to convincingly articulate why I have a few hundred friends on Digg or Myspace, etc...I am sincerely not out for any kind of online popularity contest, but what can I say, I enjoy networking and making contacts with interesting or like-minded people.

Scoble articulates better reasoning & justification for having a large contact list as well as a great explanation of the real friends/ virtual friends dichotomy: Virtual friends or contacts are not necessarily real friends, nor do they have to be.

When Digg.com made changes to their site and allowed for an unlimited number of friends, shouts, etc. I initially noticed that several diggers who I was "friends" with had un-friended me. My wife, who is not on digg, guessed that perhaps people felt like since I had several hundred friends already, I was something of a "friend whore." and that was a turn off. I don't know if this is the case of not, but I read hundreds of RSS feeds and enjoy following like-minded bookmarkers. If that's a bad thing, than shoot me.