Spud Web

But if you don’t draw that line, your list will fill up with semi-strangers, and you’ll be less likely to share personal information you want your real friends to see. (Facebook offers a way to classify your friend list to let certain clusters see different things, but it’s a pain to go through your list and categorize people.) And making those distinctions is easier said than done. “You know what it’s like when you’re figuring out who to invite to your wedding — the one day of your life that people will remember, and you have to pick who’s in or out?” Shirky says. “Facebook is like that every day.” Not surprisingly, hand-wringing about dealing with all these online friends is the province of a generation that grew up in the physical world. People under 25 seem to have painlessly adapted to these new rules, however unwritten. “Kids have gotten over this,” Boyd says. “As a teenager, you can’t reject your friends at school, but you won’t wind up having 5,000 friends, either.” Even on the no-limits MySpace, the average is 180 or so. And that includes potatoes.