How many social “friends” is too many?

TechCrunch featured an informative article earlier this week regarding possibilities for geolocation saturation (think foursquare). The article made the point that there’s only so many people an individual wants to share their specific location information with, and therefore, the more people someone follows on geolocation social networks, the less useful the network becomes. I wonder if that’s true for other types of social networks like Facebook, Twitter and even blogs…

For example, when you have hundreds of friends on Facebook, you can miss out on updates from friends who don’t post frequently. That issue is magnified on Twitter since some folks tweet every 15 minutes, others once a day and some infrequently. Personally, I’m less likely to read all blog posts captured in my Google Reader when the count soars above 1,000 because it’s less overwhelming to click the “mark all as read button.”

With that said, I’m not going to stop accepting friend requests or quit adding interesting blogs to my Reader. The issue for me is time management of social networks when the numbers get unwieldy.

How about you?

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