Small is beautiful, time to remove friends overload (“defriend“) from Facebook and other services! Two reasons for that:

• Socializing does not scale
  I wrote about this earlier (“Openness is difficult to scale“) and you might have heard of Dunbar’s number, “a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships“. After over-adopting social networks as we over-adopt any new technology, we will  push the envelope back (another fundamental trend I believe).

  Clive Thompson explains in a recent Wired column:
  
  “socializing doesn’t scale. Once a group reaches a certain size, each participant starts to feel anonymous again, and the person they’re following — who once seemed proximal, like a friend — now seems larger than life and remote. [...] So the conversation stops.”
  Clive Thompson in Praise of Online Obscurity

• More friends mean more ads
  Another reason is that, as soon as advertising becomes more aggressive on social networks, each of my friend and “friend” will becomes a reasons for social networks to advertise on me. “John bought this”, “Peter registered for that”, why don’t you do the same? That is the balance Facebook and all its competitors will have to solve.