I am an active user on Facebook. There was a number that was bugging me: 1,740 friends. Facebook used to have an upper limit of 1,000 friends, and now 5,000. But truely, how many of these friends do one actively maintained relationships with?

Robin Dubar suggested 150. However, there are mechanisms to cope with expanding numbers. It seems that we have the ability to facially recognised about 1,500 people.

1,740 looks like a crazy number even with just facial recognition.

I spent my Sunday afternoon cleaning up my list. Facebook made it hard for one to scroll through the entire friendlist. It also locked down my favourite method, extracting the list through its developer’s tool. Truth to be told, there are some I can’t recognised. They were one-off kind of acquitance (met at some events or activities and that’s it) or just plainly dropped out of sight, out of the algorithms that Facebook uses to control what content to be pushed to my Newsfeed.

The number dropped to 1,328, a good 24% gone. And yes, I am still trimming. It seems that my activity hasn’t gone unnoticed by the algorithms and I started to see content from long hidden friends.

As of now, the number stands at 1,199.