On being a Facebook slut

I’m a Facebook slut. I keep LinkedIn for parallel monogamous business connections but will friend almost anyone on Facebook. It’s all about reaching out, after all. I want as many friends as possible on Facebook, I want to share and poke and comment on their walls and I want them to reciprocate. You got a problem with that?

Thought not.

But, something odd is happening. At the time when I had fewer than 100 Facebook friends, it was rare that I’d have any friends in common with new pokers and pokees. Occasionally, a new contact would have one or two mutual friends, but never more than three. Now that I have almost 600 “friends” on Facebook its seems that whenever I look at the new friends suggestions offered up by the system, almost all of them share at least 40 or 50 friends in common.

To me this suggests that Facebook is becoming a closed circle in which almost all my friends and potential friends all know each other. It’s becoming an almost fully interconnected network. Forget six degrees of separation, Facebook looks from this point of view to be two-degrees of separation.

Now, that’s not a good thing, really, is it? It means that your friends are all my friends, and my friends are yours and no one new is joining the inner sanctum, our almost closed circle of acquaintance. Maybe it’s just me, but do you see it too in the putative friends with whom Facebook suggests you connect? I’d be interested to know.

I’d also be interested to know how to break out of this inner circle and take my Facebook promiscuity to the next level. I’ve had enough of this virtual inbreeding, I want fresh blood…