friends

I was thinking today about the different categories that we have for labeling people.

People don't just fall into either "friends" or "strangers." There are many shades of gray.

We have acquaintances, school-friends, work-friends, people we know from the gym, family-friends, old friends, teammates, friends-of-friends, good friends, best friends, and nowadays we have the new category which is facebook friends.

Some people limit the people that they friend on Facebook to actual good friends of theirs. Other people will friend every single person that they know. The guy that they talked to for ten minutes at the party last night? Yup, he is getting a friend request.

I was looking at some of my friends' profiles and they really run the gamut. I have one friend who only has 21 facebook friends. I have another friend who has over 2,000 friends!

I personally have 386 friends on Facebook. Do I really have 386 friends in my life? No.

I decided to do a little experiment and I went through my list of facebook friends and made a list of how many of them I have had actual contact with in the last two months.

I decided that "contact" would mean either talking on the phone, seeing them face-to-face, writing or receiving a letter or email from them. Writing on their walls did not count. Mass forwarded emails also did not count.

So out of 386 people, how many would you guess I had actual contact with in the last two months?


The answer? 52. That's actually a lot higher than I expected it to be. I thought the number would be more like 20.

I wonder how many of those 2,000 facebook friends has my friend had contact with in the past two months??