FRIENDS!FRIENDS? FRIENDS??! FACEBOOK.

Really, am like the only one who has a network of friends below the number, 200 on Facebook. Even Funmi, whom I introduced to Facebook, is racing towards over 400 friends which more than doubles mine. Some people actually have up to a 1000.Pray, how do you communicate with these people cos really, even if you had to spend half a day on Facebook, you couldn’t get to a quarter of a 1000.Or could you?
The argument of a friend that, apart from getting to hook up with your friends and maintaining that steady stream of info , Facebook provides you with a data base of people connected to you on several levels(from close friends , to no-where- near-close friends), so you could easily check on them, sounds logical , but I am still a bit sceptical.
I mean do you actually confirm every Tope, Dike and Hassan that sends you a friend request? Ahh, I bet you do. Notes like “I just saw your pix men, I love what I saw and I think we’ll be very good friends…bla.bla.bla” hardly pass as motivation to click “confirm”. Initially, for me t’was just real friends, and then, I’d check if we had any mutual friends and who these mutual friends were before I confirmed. Then much later, the criteria was if I liked your profile picture and you looked like a potentially interesting person. (How I knew? You guessed right. I didn’t.)But when it seemed like I was the least sociable person, thanks to my ever stagnant network of friends, I confirmed virtually every body!
Now, I check my friends and see dozens of names I have no idea who, what, where…
Some try to get friendly and chatty. It flows sometimes. Other times, it’s just not “werking”. The one that could be annoying is when you have someone literally bugging you.
A friend of mine is a case study. She had this guy stalking her, you might say. He’ll poke her, send speed date posts, invite her to all sorts of applications, post tons of comments on her status and every picture, and write on her wall. I mean this person was actually in every nook and cranny of her profile. At first, she ignored this “stranger” (Remember, she confirmed him) and then later, she decided to respond. Just a few comments, here and there. She never checked his profile. After it seemed like it was finally “werking”, she decided to check his profile. The otondo had his date of birth, year inclusive, on his profile and my very good friend who was almost, if not already, lovey- dopey realised he was like, 8 years younger than she was. Alright, so you thinking, “So what?” Abeg, my friend is sooo due for marriage and an “about-to enter-school” boy certainly aint it.
Truth be told, how many of us can boast of having a maximum of, say, 10 “strangers” on our network? So these people are just names and pictures, occupying our space and having access to our profile and pictures. Talk about giving yourself high visibility and accessibility.
I am not even going to dwell on the security implication of this. I am just cool with the fact that once you get uncomfortable with a friend, you are free to kick him out of your network. As for the race to winning the “Facebook member with the highest number of friends” title, guys, I think I will take a rain check!