[article & video] Is Facebook Testing Removal of the 5000 Friend Limit?

About a week ago, I got to the Facebook limit of “friends” one can have on Facebook. I’m really particular about how I friend on Facebook, so it took me a lot longer than most people who have mailing lists and popular web sites.

Meaning that unlike other people who got to the limit from

• simply accepting all takers,
• going out and finding 5000 people who share their interests,
• or having an assistant or outside company do one of the two,

I would only accept requests from people whose names I recognized, or who knew people whose names I recognized AND shared a certain sub-set of common interests with me.

And even still, I prioritize certain people’s news and updates by filtering my news feed.

All of that is a preface to a strange thing I noticed the last time I logged into my account about 20 minutes ago.

At first when I logged in, my friends number was at 5002. I had seen that a couple of times, but didn’t think much of it. I figured that three requests for friendship came through so close together that it didn’t trip the programming from blocking additional request fast enough.

I refreshed the page and it was at 5281, as shown in the video above.

(If you’re reading this via feed or as republished on sites like Facebook or Zimbio, you’ll want to click through to see the 2 minute video.)

Now, this could be for several reasons.

1. Facebook could finally be lifting the 5000 friends limit, as Mark Zuckerberg said in a Twitter update in March of this year.
2. Facebook could be testing lifting the 5000 friends limit, and it’s only visible to certain people (I noticed it flick on Trey Pennington’s profile earlier today but wasn’t fast enough to take a picture).
3. Facebook may have combined the friends number with the pages number (which may also mean an even more friend-like presence to Facebook pages, possibly foreshadowed by the recent change in the way Facebook has rearranged how the Inbox appears.

I looked at the Facebook blog before posting this and didn’t see any announcements that foretell any of these. By the number, I’d think it was option 3, as that number is closest to the number of Facebook friends and pages I have, though I believe it’s still off.

If the Friend limit has been lifted or is in testing, that number could represent the number of people I tried to approve in the iPhone version of Facebook that I browsed with my new iPod Touch this weekend.

Guess we’ll see. Let me know if you see anything else strange. I expect my number of friends to be back down to 5002 the next time I log into Facebook, but I thought that such a huge jump, however temporary, was worth noting.

[update 12;39 pm Eastern] Actually, it’s back again. See video below for what seems to make it pop up: