Why count friends, Facebook?

How many friends do you have?

A few years ago this would’ve been an odd question. But today online, we are confronted with a number next to our picture, every day. An odometer of popularity: The Facebook friend counter. Twitter has the same thing, a follower counter.  

We should take those numbers down. They have joined weight, age and salary as unhealthy status symbol statistics. 

Ashton Kutcher has 2.9 million Twitter followers, tops in the world. Those numbers are as unreal as the mediocre TV and movie star's salary. TechCrunch reported that three-quarters of all Twitter users have fewer than 50 followers.

Facebook caps friends lists at 5,000. Several have hit that, and others are close. Facebook reports that the average user has just 120 friends.  

In other words, we have rushed to embrace yet another way in which we won't measure up.

A woman recently told me she prizes "quality, not quantity" on Twitter. Yet days earlier she asked my help because an automated service she signed up for to get Twitter followers backfired and was blasting the followers she has with spam. Hey, I've done that. There are as many fake Twitter follower services as there are bogus weight-loss ads. They play to the same vulnerability: We want those pretty numbers. 

So many of us, like the woman above and myself, have tried joining a "follower train," signing up to follow a group of people, knowing they will all follow us back. (I don't recommend it. I unfollowed many of the new people I connected with, and they unfollowed me.) I also held a contest to gain followers, which didn't work, either. Some tweeters follow tens of thousands of people so they will gain just as many followers. I don't want to do that. I am not Ashton Kutcher, in so many ways. 

On Facebook, we might OK people's friend requests not to get to know them better, but because we'd like to have more friends. We're getting friend implants.

I have told myself I need the big numbers because of my new job as a social networking writer. And maybe I do need to follow and friend a lot of people, to get a broader view. But I think a lot of us tell ourselves the same thing in different areas of our lives: I need hair plugs. I need to tan. I need to look better.  

Taking down the number counters wouldn't prevent us from seeing who each other's friends and followers are. But how many would no longer be there in our faces every day. 

The evening I met Twitter CEO Evan Williams, a haughty tech type asked, "How many followers do you have?" Then he scoffed at the total I reported: 200. Williams is a good guy. I don't think he built Twitter to be a popularity counter.

Counting friends is dumb in elementary school. It's really dumb for a whole generation to do.

Facebook and Twitter have raced into our lives, pulling us together in new ways. That's a good thing. But we've just accepted this new way to compare and evaluate ourselves. Maybe we're not meant to have as many friends and followers as possible. Or to keep track of that. 

In retrospect, posting numbers of how many friends we have will seem absurd. Maybe it already does.

“What about celebrating friend-acquisition milestones?” asks Charlotte’s Chip Wallach, a BofA guy, with a note of sarcasm. “What is appropriate when you reach the 100th friend? The 300th? 1000th? Who has this many ‘friends’ anyway?”

Facebook and Twitter, take down the counters. 

Photo at top is from the UK Guardian