The Strata of Facebook Friends

As a follow up to Mark Cuban's post on Facebook's power level and the types of social network friends considered, I thought I would produce my own stratification on my wall of friends.

Cuban had to seriously work out a new strategy for accepting friends given Facebook's enforced 5,000 friend limit. He reconciled he had 3 levels of friends:

- Real friends - those people who he actually met in real life and who he enjoyed keeping in touch with. FB provided him a great way to keep up with things with them via pictures, notifications, etc.

- People who he had tangential connections to - they may have lived in his local network, fans of his business or interests, or in the groups or fan pages he's in. For whatever reason there is something about them that he could connect to.

- People who are called "The Power Layer." These are people who in whatever industry they are in , retain some level of power. These are people that if they sent him FB mail, i would certainly read and respond to , and I think they would do the same.

Given my current rate of acceleration,  I will likely be hitting the same ceiling marker Cuban has hit in the next 3-4 months,  so I thought I'd take inventory of the strata of friends and what value they have to me  on Facebook.

- Real Life Friends - Social/Family - cementing relationships online that already exist offline
- Real Life Colleagues - Business - creating ease of contact and a bit more fun than an email exchange
- Real Life Ties - Blasts from the past, School, previous work, old neighbours - good nostalgic fun and once every so often get-togethers
- Tangential Connections - genuinely interesting people - inspiration, aspiration and reason for coffee meetups
- Tangential Connections - people with similar hobbies, pastimes or tastes - advice, group membership and info for other cool stuff happening on Facebook
- Tangential Connections - industry colleagues - new friends, awareness of interesting developments, source of referral for other new colleagues
- Bloggers - social media enthusiasts who I've stumbled by or they've stumbled by Buzz Canuck - the most active, excitable and emailable friends, source of passion and recognition
- Conference colleagues - people who have met me at seminars, speaking sessions or other gigs - sometimes great business generating contacts, othertimes shared passion and fanship
- Influencers - either people with key Influential traits or people from our community The Influencers - rallying points for people who have a profile chockful of interests, over 200 friends or very savvy, very smart and/or very stylish people 
- Power Friends - celebrities - magnets for attention, may not ever develop a relationship i.e. yes, i was shallow enough to link to my fave Hollywood actor Matt Damon, judge me if you want
- Power Friends - positional authority - Silicon Valley, Hollywood, Washington, Ottawa or other spread out corporate potentates, political heavyweights, published authors or academic icons
- Random drive-bys - people who want to vampire bite, SuperWall or Hot or Not me -oftentimes a regrettable add, sometimes an amusing sideshow

Now which of these are more valuable? When I'm at 4,950 friends, which 50 should I or will I add? Have I missed any other strata of social network friends online?