Shane Conder's Whateveritis of Nothing

So, I was reading this post from Joi Ito, as well as all of the responses. I find the entire thing quite amusing. At first, I was thinking, "Sure, why bother with a limit at all. It's just a buddy list, right?" Well, after reading the comments I realized that each "buddy" carries with it presence traffic. And given the well connected nature of presence within a graph of connected people, that can be a lot of traffic. But then, everyone appears to be complaining that 150 is far too few and that they use what essentially amounts to buddy aggregation tools where they can spread their buddy lists out across as many services as possible in attempt to not hit any individual services limit. This means, literally, having hundreds of buddies.

I just don't get it. I understand having business contacts and coworkers on the buddy list along with friends and family. But seriously, just how many people do you really want on the list?

It's strange, though. My sister, who is about 15, probably has well over 100 people on hers. Most, of course, are just class mates or friends of friends from some party or another, I'm sure.

Now there's my buddy list, on the other side. I thought I had a lot with about 30 on it. That tends to cover the majority of my coworkers, most of my friends, and pretty much every family member that has a computer. That also covers a few people that are just business contacts. As it is, I turned off all notifications of when people become present and go away, and whatnot. It was all too much for me already. So I look at the 150 limit and basically consider it to be far more than I'd ever want or even have a need to use.

How very odd...

Joi Ito's Web: Too many buddies

Posted by Shane on August 12, 2004 8:30 AM | Permalink