One thing I’ll grudgingly grant to MySpace – the site works. That’s more than I can say for Facebook over the last month or so.
In the past Facebook has had desperately slow page views and occasional downtime. But recently, the site has become almost unusable for me. And no, I’m not just talking about the abysmal messaging system that still won’t let me properly sort through thousands of emails. I’m talking about a complete inability to create new “connections.”
My profile (no vanity URL for me yet) is near the 5,000 limit on friends, but it has a few slots to spare. And I’m a fan of only a handful of Facebook pages. But any time I try to add or confirm a friend, or become a fan of a page, I get an error saying “Sorry, you cannot create any more connections.”
The fact that there are limits at all on connections is absurd (MySpace doesn’t have this limit, neither does Twitter or any other site I can think of). And the fact that I can’t make new connections even though I’m under the limit is worse.
I know Facebook continues to grow at a breakneck pace – Comscore pegs them at 316 million monthly visitors and 122 billion page views. But the fact that MySpace, no slouch in the user numbers or page views themselves (122 million, 35 billion), hasn’t had these problems is worth noting.
MySpace has a different architecture than Facebook, though. News items from friends aren’t pushed to my home page into one feed, for example. Regardless, Facebook needs to address this on a technical level, not a policy one.
A Facebook employee, listening to my gripes, recently told me to switch my Profile to a Page, and they would transfer all my 5,000 friends and 4,500 or so friend requests over to that page as fans. But putting aside the fact that people may not be so happy to be labeled as “fans,” this still isn’t a good solution. I can’t have a two way connection with these people via messaging and chat.
Facebook either needs to ditch the idea of friends entirely and move to a Twitter follow model, or allow as many connections as I choose to create. The company now has 1,000 employees, I’ve heard recently. One of those bright and eager engineers should be able to fix this.
Am I asking a lot of a company that has grown faster than perhaps any Internet company in history? Probably. But if they want to be the next Google, it’s time to get organized.
I’ve encountered quite a few problems myself recently. For instance with quite a few people in my network when I try to look who are friends with them I get an error message, especially when they have lots of friends.
Now the big question is if those problems are just regular growing pains and just require more horsepower and a little optimization OR if they are systematic and are at the core of the network’s logic. If it turns out that way they have way more trouble ahead of themselves with the shift to realtime / twitter type approach.
Facebook is now teeming with errors, for sure. Status updates, removing/clearing your previous updates etc. does not work as it used to be. Also, the home page is becoming more and more cluttered…. yes, I agree when you say better horsepower is needed…maybe as Michael says, some of Facebook’s 1000 guys should come up with a strategy to resolve this growing irritations..
By the way, thanks Michael for bringing this up.
My guess is that those problems are based on systematic infrastructure issues that are not that easy to fix. Also they do seem a bit in a rush to change from closed protected system to more openness and more realtime sharing – which is a monster task with such a behemoth. Not so surprising that errors sneak in if you think of it.
aint anti-spammer measures a b*tch!
They’ll need to up that limit (to unlimited?) if they want to stay in the Twitter race they’ve begun.
thats true, no point in keeping these kind of limits when no auto adding scripts work!
fb is working hard these days, with new features, if not reorganise. And it has very less downtime compared to twitter.
I have under 200 friends on FB and even I have been getting errors left and right. Earlier tonight I couldn’t update my status and got an error message after trying for 10 mins. Finally it worked, something in the system must have been jiggled.
Have also had FB appear to “freeze” in that it seemed like every link I tried clicking on would AJAX-ily freeze and not load anything. That was really annoying, but I think it’s mostly cleared up now.
Yeah, out of the tens of millions of Facebook users, this probably affects a good six or eight people.
Definitely something to fix. But you have to realize that, other than the cudgel of bad press, the company would probably rather focus efforts on attracting another 0.01% of MySpace’s users than on appeasing one edge case.
well, three edge cases if you read the comments above.
well Michael I think the comment comes more from your tone. It sounded a bit out of touch with the average facebook user, is all.
I’m not sure if it’s because i’m nowhere near the limit of friends or related to location, or any other factor, but i have never had this error message…
Michael, Facebook “ditching” the idea of friends would completely shatter its base, right? Though MySpace used profess itself as a place for friends, it is facebook which is actually fulfilling the promise.
But I agree with you that people don’t want to be labeled fans and would prefer friends. Twitter-like follow method may not work for Facebook as it is built on friend-model.
My favorite is when I try to make an event. I added 50 people to the invite list. When I finish the process I get a warning saying “the invites will be sent eventually” or something. I check back a few hours later. I’m the only one in the event still. Fine I try again. Same thing.
The solution? Invite 5 people at a time. That works. Tedious and annoying. Behaves more like a college CS project than a 1000 person company.
Totally agree with your comment. Just made my first event yesterday, ran through my entire friends list and selected a good portion, to find it didn’t update. Then went back through 5-7 at a time.
SO painful.
And then I wanted to send some msgs to people outside my friends network about the event, but after sending 7-8 messages, I was banned from FB from sending any more messages ‘for an undetermined amount of time’ because I triggered an automatic ’spam protection’ mechanism. And I was writing individual messages, not copying-pasting one message.
Just left a really bad taste in my mouth.
Clearly anyone with 5000 friends is ‘celebrity’, Twitter is in with celebrity, and we all know how much Facebook likes Twitter.
They’re not going to lift the cap any time soon, if at all, not when they’re pushing for the same adoption from celebrities Twitter is receiving.
huh?
FB code = don’t care about standards etc. Too big to fail.
Less haste, fewer grammatical errors.
“Less errors” is incorrect. “Fewer errors” is the correct phrase to use in your title.
Signed,
Your third grade English teacher.
sigh….
you don’t want to be that guy.
I don’t know if you are a professional writer, but if you are then you really ought to know when to use “less” and when to use “fewer”. This is basic English grammar.
now i’m just leaving it in because it bugs you so much.
Let’s face it, you’re leaving it in because you don’t understand what they are talking about.
You know you’re a boring individual when you have to scan the internet for grammatical mistakes… and then waste everyone’s time by pointing them out.
While on that:
its = possessive
it’s = contraction of “it is”
Amen. I did a find for “fewer” to see where this comment was. Disappointed that instead of correcting it, the error was left in to spite you.
What idiot has 5000 friends? I haven’t MET 5000 people in my life let alone being friends with that many. Your christmas card bill must be huge. Oh that’s right, you’ve lost that human touch of individual cards. Now it’s just Merry Xmas – send to all. How warm, how caring of you to make me feel so special.
If there is 6 billion people in the world and we all have 5.9 billion friends, arn’t we just back where we started. A phone book only this time with drunk pictures?
just imagine how many ‘friends’ of those you never interact with … dead links so to speak.
that is nonsense for netlog and co. …..
let facebook be for people with real names and real friends.
my opinion
Sorry to hear that you don’t get out often.
When I joined facebook it was an online yearbook and a classmate tracker. Convenient for college kids. It was the norm to add pretty much everyone you met in dorms, at parties, in class etc…
Most of the time you end up interacting with a small % of the people in your “friends” list … doesnt mean the facebook-rolodex isnt useful
Oh I get out quite a bit and have hmmmm about 30 real close friends.
I’m just not that insecure to feel the need to prove it to the world. And frankly I don’t want you to see who I am friends with.
facebook should use jquery!!!
Fanboy… Jquery is great but its client side and has NOTHING to do with the server side, the reason for the limit is the server side set up, and the huge amounts of resources it must take to combine 5,000 “friends” wall postings into one thread…
facebook should open up its java-script restrictions so I can use jquery
stupid FBJS/MockAjax [ok, ok, they're not that bad, but I don't want to rewrite code ;( ]
it’s called an iframe app, little bit harder as there are many more bugs/issues to deal with but well worth it in the end.
I bet Google could do it in an efficient manner. :p
I went to http://www.face....com/techcrunch to find this article so I could share it on my feed and there were links like “share it” and “twitter it”, etc. and when I clicked on them they all went to http://www.techcrunch.com but didn’t do the actions I expected.
same with me.
you are EDGE case mr. arrington. seriously.
I can’t honestly believe you said MySpace is more reliable than Facebook! I remember back in 2005 when MySpace was down or unusable most of the time. In fact, the lack of stability was a big reason why I initially switched over to Facebook so long ago. However, you are correct in saying that Facebook has been hiccuping quite a bit of late.Â
As for dropping the friends paradigm, I would have to disagree. It’s the main reason why i use it. Contrary to MySpace’s tagline, Facebook actually feels more like a place for friends than MySpace! Facebook essentially has Twitter follows, in the form of Page fans, so they don’t need to copy that.Â
As for your original problem, Facebook should raise or remove the friend limit. However, I can’t imagine how you can concievably have 5,000 close friends. Acquaintences? Sure. But close friends?That would be incredible. The only way I can see someone getting that many friends is if they were effectively operating their Facebook account like a Twitter account (with thousands of followers instead of a few close friends). In that case, the recommendation to create a Page makes sense.Â
The difference is MySpace built a decent QA department and is more reliable if you check any of the numbers for the past few years. Facebook is going to continue to have errors until they get serious about quality. They act like letting coders QA their own shit is some kind of forward thinking wave of the future but experienced people know different. Any good system has checks and balances, you just have to keep it nimble.
Grammatical gripes aside, you make a good point, Mike. In their efforts to compete with Twitter, the 5,000 cap on friends should be the FIRST thing to go. Instead, to compete with Twitter, they’re adopting the worst feature from the service (public status messages) and, in doing so, eroding people’s privacy. I had all my privacy dials set to “paranoid” on my account. Now — without changing a thing — headhunters are hitting me up on private message. WTF?
I’m guessing Facebook’s stability issues are due in large part to a (fr)agile development cycle, where pushes to production happen daily without rigorous testing and with little regard for dependency checking. With 1,000 employees under the roof of their new suburban digs, it’s time for Facebook to reign in the cowboy ninja script monkeys and “crack the whip”.
“cowboy ninja script monkeys”
i like!
facebook technical errors and facebook spam. wow – we are going full circle here. what’s next for them? goldfish memories.
“One thing I’ll grudgingly grant to MySpace – the site works.”
I LOL’d.
The site works in the sense that it is generally up when you try and go to it. It far from works in the idea of a good platform for people to use.
Probably because you’re the only one on it
a bit hasty publishing this gripe, I think, as you left a sentence uncomplete and then repeated it: “…But the fact that MySpace, no slouch in the user numbers or page views themselves (122 million, 35 billion).
The fact is that MySpace…”
Again taking a correction and not making any note of it. At least let me delete (my now nonsensical) comment.
yeah like <0.1% of people on facebook have that problem, when you run a big business that is of course the first thing you really need to fix…ridiculous.
they should ban you from facebook, that would be a whole lot easier without some users like you thinking they are so special and everything needs to be changed for them.
lotta anger in there. let it out.
I agree with Kayoone, they should totally ban you
Personally I hate FB. But agree with kay. it’s not a banking website. It’s not like anything realy important goes on there. So you can’t see how many bananas were tossed your way today – big deal come back tomorrow.
Though i never experienced the errors you mentioned ,i get some strange error when i browse through application ..
“No Network
Transport error (#1001) while retrieving data from endpoint `/ajax/apps/fetchAppDirectoryCategory.php’: A network error occurred. Check that you are connected to the internet.”
Ugh Facebook
I know I’ll likely get flamed in here for saying so (because I know most of the Tech Crunch crowd worships at the FB alter on both knees) but seriously I don’t get what the love affair is about.
The site is a jumbled mess of buttons, badges, bells and whistles that bore and confuse me to no end. I mean I want to meet and reunite with people not get a virtual daisy or green patch..who cares about that crap?
To top it off the people that I have connected with on there are exactly the people I hid from on Myspace. I’m talking about the kid I didn’t want to hang out with in High School or the girl I dumped when I was twenty. Facebook isn’t a place for friends…it’s an outlet for boring people and stay at home moms who have nothing better to do all day but to talk about the good old times that really weren’t all that good.
Facebook is an uber fad on a meteoric rise that will likely have an equally meteoric fall. They haven’t figured out how to make any real money and the second they figure out that they need to really advertise their snooty core base will peace out. I personally can’t wait to see that happen. Not because I like when people fail…more so because I love when smug people with even smugger followers fail.
“Facebook isn’t a place for friends…it’s an outlet for boring people and stay at home moms who have nothing better to do all day but to talk about the good old times that really weren’t all that good.”
I Lol’d
I forsaw the friend limit when I hit 4.5k friends. The sad thing is the majority of them were legit friends from school, work, and then some of them of course were people who knew my work previously or decided to follow me on Facebook as they did Twitter. I setup a fan page per request of the Facebook help page and asked my friends to move to that…. mainly to see if they would. Most actually were offended thinking that I didn’t want to have a two way connection with them anymore.
I really hope Facebook can begin fixing this errors and start communicating with the users a bit more as well… and while I’m at it with the developers a bit more would be nice as well.
Ahaha, nice Mick, love to see top stories about bugs concerning 0,000000001% (yeah, i did some maths) of interner users
Agreed about errors and poor performance. Often I have to open multiple tabs to allow things to load in parallel. As somebody mentioned above hopefully this isn’t symptomatic of an unscalable architecture.
However more interestingly, maybe there is value to FB limiting the number of “friends” you have. In the same way that twitter’s 140 char limit inadvertantly forces brevity on you, FB having a limit of e.g. 500 friends would force you to think carefully about who you include.
Fred Wilson (I think) once wrote a blog post about how he went through and culled his friends list on FB, reducing to actual friends and family. For him it then became much more useful – for more distant or non-personal contacts, there were still plenty of ways to remain connected via twitter, linkedin et al.
I guess it depends really on what you use fb for. Are there really 5000+ people in this world that you care about enough to see their photos, personal status updates etc? Maybe there are for you, but personally I would find my “real” friends would get drowned out in the noise (esp. given the new FB move to be more twitter like). E.g. I like to be able to read all the status updates made on FB each day.
Maybe a better compromise solution allowing scalability would be to use lists to divide your friends up and only allow you to view one list at a time with a maximum of 500 per list.
Facebook already allows you to create lists of friends and filter your stream by those lists- http://www.face...ok.com/friends/
Yep I know – I mean forcing people to use them so FB doesn’t have to deal with 5000 in one go.
Depends on the arcitechture really.
E.g having 500 friends fine, but once you have 501, you have to use lists to split so you no longer see updates from everyone in one go.
Also while we’re at it, it would be good if lists had a bit more fine grained control over visibility. So e.g. for a status update I can pick whether to show to all (default), show to some lists, or exclude some lists. Similar for individual photos by third parties in which I’ve been tagged etc. I guess the tough thing is coming up with a good degree of control without it getting too complex to use for the average user.
Clearly you people with more than 33 friends are consistently bumping up against that 640kb limit. I would like to meet the idiot who said that any more than 33 or so friends is “ridiculous from a practical standpoint” and “technologically not feasible.”
Facebarf – Sure, Zuckerberg thinks everybody is going to make their recommendations and do their shopping through Facebook, creating a world wide financial paradigm shift as all funds go through FB. His premise is flawed, no one questions it, even Andresssen who I admire for “getting it” says $500 million for FB. The odds for the FB are such that in a couple of years another fad will replace it completely. Ugh, for politicians and well-known startup guys, it must be nice for the media to repeat 1,000 times what they say with no critical analysis of even the most ridiculous statements.
You seriously have 5,000 friends?
Facebook has always said it wanted to focus on REAL connections, not finding random people like myspace.
I personally refuse friendship requests from anyone who I would:
a) Not recognize if I passed them on the street
b) Would not stop to talk to if I passed them on the street
Facebook cancelled my 3+ year account with no warning or explanation and they won’t reply to my emails either.
I want to thank them for doing me a favor. Now I can stop wasting time on their platform writing apps and networking with 1000 fake accounts of Angelina Jolie and instead work on my own product instead.
Facebook will soon lose it’s appeal just like myspace.
Twitter does have a limit. I remember reading about it on TechCrunch.
If they don’t limit people like you, Facebook will end up like MySpace. CRAP on every profile. So much CRAP that the browser fails.
So yeah, in the recent months Facebook became less and less stable, but please… Stop your whining!
Thank you.
even i am facing problems with Facebook when there are huge number of friends involved.. either in your profile or your friends profile.. seems they kept the friends limit too close to what their system can bear!
I’m a Facebook app developer, and simply *searching* for an app throws an error 1/2 the time for me.
That is weird, cause it works perfectly fine for me……
Mark Zuckerberg has a page, not a profile so I don’t see what the big deal is. And to be honest, no one can have over 5000 “friends”
You cannot call “a friend” a person who adds you to their friends list or follows you because of your popularity. They’re not your friends, they’re your fans 
Yeah, the way I think of it is this. In my profile I make available my phone number, email addys, address, photos of me at personal events (eating with friends, holidays etc).
Then I only accept as friends people who I would freely give this info to.
An even tighter way of doing it would be to apply the wedding invite test…
I have a little over 200 friends and have noticed quite few errors when trying to update my status. It either just hangs and the status box is grayed out or it pops up an error with some kind of gibberish about syntax. Tells me it didn’t go through…but 9 times out of 10 it has.
Noticed another friend just yesterday commented they were having problems replying/commenting on anything.
So…its not just the sue-puh stahs.
IMHO if you have 5000 “friends”, your not using the application the way it was intended.
This is like spammers saying saying spam filters are broken. No they aren’t… they are just doing their job perfectly.
If things get to the point where “friends” turn into businesses (you may not be able to sell an account per the TOS, but I doubt they will catch you)… people will leave the service very fast.
IMHO this abuse prevention is critical to their survival. The throttle likely effects < 0.0001% of users and saves the 99.999% of users. Seems like a good tradeoff for a business to make.
You can’t make everyone happy. As a business your goal is to keep as many customers as possible happy.
So why is facebook so much better again? Aside from being the new hotness that everyone followed everyone else over to.
This is a great post that illustrates how you’ve transcended above being a blogger/reporter and into a power broker… In my opinion, a well deserved role.
This is why people are envious of you and do such cowardly acts against you. I am vehemently against the cowards, I just point it out as matter of factly.
But I’ll have to admit I was slightly delighted when you didn’t get your way about policing Facebooks holocaust denying discussions. That said, I’m 99% in agreement on your other efforts, in general.
I’m sure you’ll get your new feature here. Point is, it’s not about Myspace versus Facebook, it’s about Michael throwing his weight around to elicit change, the kind of change he desires.
It’s like the old days of AIM buddy lists — what? you have more that 250 people you’d like to keep in touch with? sorry, you have to prioritize your friends…
You don’t have 5,000 friends.
Im’ totally agree with @arrington
I am having the exact same issue Mike. Let me know if Facebook is able to do anything about this. I am in the same situation with 5,000 friends, and countless requests pending. This is quite annoying because while I try to keep my fan pages low, there are a few that I would like to join, and thus now can’t.
Honestly, deleting my Myspace account was very satisfying.
Gasp! Ditch the idea of friends? But what of the beloved social graph?
Why don’t you people who have thousands of friends just start up a second account. You could call it ‘Me 2′.
Then you could friend yourself.
As a professional who use online apps and software all day I find unstable applications frustrating. It seriously dilutes good feelings for the brand. Even though Facebook is free, how long will users put up with this?
What the author doesn’t seem to grasp is that Facebook isn’t a popularity contest like Myspace. The reason Myspace allows the author to have all his “friends” is because the architecture of the site is completely different. With Facebook you’re receiving feeds from all of your friends. Much like Robert stated, the reason your page isn’t working is because you don’t actually know these 5000 people, you just want to collect as many as possible because that how it worked on Myspace. I would assume that an author for a tech site would know how an application worked before they took the time to bash it but apparently not. Maybe going back to Myspace would be the right thing to do if a popularity contest is what you want.
Fully agree!!
5000 friends is just too much. Unless you want to complain for complaints sake, It is not practically possible to have that much friends or people you know. Are you a celebrity or something ? Do you ask random people to add to your facebook. You sound absurd…
Dear Michael,
“The fact that there are limits at all on connections is absurd”. Trying to have more than 5 000 so-called friends on a social platform, and refusing to create a Fan page, is absurd.
You just ruin the concept behind Facebook “Connect with your Friends”. Friends, dude, not people who you’ve never met and who wants to be connected somehow to you.
I’m just saying that I don’t get the idea behind the will to have thousands and thousands of people connected to you. To me, you’re like a brand now and therefore, people who are willing to follow you should be considered as fans…. or any words other than friends. Please.