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Sunday, September 30, 2007

Gmail - The Latest from TechCrunch

The sky is the limit and Robert Scoble has 5,000 friends on Facebook. That's over half of the population of the Loviisa town or the Sotkamo municipality. How many real friends do I have? I guess the number is somewhere between 1 to 20 people on this globe. Is this a conservative or optimstic estimate? I don't know.

Real and virtual friends are two different cathegories. Some of my real friends don't have a clue of my online life. The virtual world don't know anything about me as a real an physical person. Still, I think that the virtual part is having a growing impact on my life.

TechCrunch: "So Facebook will finally allow users to group friends and control information flow based on friend type. For guys like Robert Scoble, who have 5,000 friends (the limit), this may be a way to finally sort through the real friends from the fans. It’s a much needed feature that people have been requesting for a long time.

It also shows the steady maturity of Facebook from a college network to a full on world network, where friendships, business contacts, family and other types of relationships need to be more fully described. And this is also as much about privacy as it is about organization - users will be able to limit the information that certain friend groups receive.

A few existing applications are going to be affected, like Slide’s Top Friends application, the most popular third party app on Facebook. Lots of other applications will likely need to be tweaked to work properly when this launches (so many of them access the friends list).

And this will shut down at least one “startup” we’ve been tracking that was creating this exact feature as an application. At least they can quit now and stop putting good time and money after bad."

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