ONSTAR WILL DONATE up to $250,000 to the families of police officers killed in the line of duty. For every person who fans OnStar, they will donate a dollar to the families. This is a great cause; I encourage you to fan Onstar and help the families of the fallen.
Sadly, I can’t do so myself, as Facebook has told me I have too many friends and fan pages.
How many friends is too many? Whom should I remove? Which fan pages should I unlike, if I could manage Facebook likes?
Here’s the nuttier part. Although I can’t add friends or pages, people can still add me. Every day at least half a dozen people do so. Some of them may have attended An Event Apart. Some may like A List Apart or A Book Apart. Others may have read Designing With Web Standards. Or this website. In some cases I know why people are reaching out to me; in others I don’t. This doesn’t bother me. I pretty much always say yes to new Facebook friends.
My reward for contributing significantly to Facebook’s content and networks is that I can never add another friend or fan another page (although anyone can add me as a friend).
Fanning Onstar to help the families of the fallen is much more important than this silly problem. I don’t lose sleep worrying about the friends I can no longer make on Facebook. I’m not complaining for personal reasons. I just wanted to point out—for my friends who work at Facebook and read this site—that Facebook’s rules about friends are arbitrary, incomprehensible, and broken. And in this case, this foolishness hurts (however slightly) the families of fallen officers. And that’s really not right.