I couldn't agree with this article more. Due to the awkwardness around not accepting a friend invite, my Facebook consists of just about everyone I've ever kno

I couldn't agree with this article more. Due to the awkwardness around not accepting a friend invite, my Facebook consists of just about everyone I've ever known in my life. It is convenient to have an easy channel to track someone down if you need to talk to them but the wall has become completely unusable to me. The combination of 1) having too many people that I don't have real relationships with on Facebook 2) many of my friends' postings of very low value things (ex. I'm eating an apple right now) 3) the increased usage of auto-updates (ex. I'm listening to 'Rihanna'), Facebook has turned into a wasteland of posts where about 1 / 500 updates are actually useful to me and finding that 1 is no longer worth it. I know the natural response to this is that I should be organizing my friends better but I'm not sure that this is a solution, because I have certain friends that will post 'low value' updates and then post something very 'high value' (value meaning somehow interesting to me). So the first problem for Facebook is trying to figure out how to cherry pick the good posts to show me and this in itself is incredibly difficult. But the problem gets exponentially harder as I add more friends (which will continue to happen to avoid awkward moments in the real world) assuming that I only have time to read X number of updates. In other words if on average every friend has 1 / 100 high value updates, the chance of Facebook getting it right and getting that high value update into the 100 updates I read every day gets lower as I add more friends and there is more noise to filter. It seems to me that there may be a bell curve to the usefulness of Facebook based on your friend count - in the beginning it is marginally useful when you only have a few friends, it becomes very useful when you have some magical conservative number of friends and then it becomes again marginally useful as your friend count gets very high. The problem is that keeping your friend count at that magical number and not progressing past that is very difficult.