Or, instead, think of this as a way to stop being an attention whore and instead of having 19,000 "friends" that you broadcast every thought and event in your life every day, consider it a way to be more discrete and thoughtful. Beginning with who you feel necessary to include in your "social graph".
Perhaps a more appropriate first step toward stopping being an "attention whore" is discerning your audience. I would be very surprised if your post is very useful advice for most of the people here.
I agree that not everyone is an attention whore, but if they have enough people that they need to use social networking with that they have to bulk-load them, then they probably are. My contact book is enormous, but I don't need a social network for most of those people. I don't need to update my coworkers on anything outside of work and I doubt businesses are using social networks for their employees to conduct business with. I certainly don't need to do social networking with someone I might have had a meal with while on a trip oversea, either. Keep them in my address book. Drop them a note sometime. Sure. But the number of people a non-attention-whore needs to interact with on a basis frequent enough to justify being part of an actual social networking application surely must be well below the "bulk loading" number?
The step of categorizing your social networking broadcast channels into proper groups has been years overdue. That's a great feature. I'm just saying that maybe people should pause and take a minute to actually do with Google+ what they originally intended to do with Facebook. You know, four or five years ago when the whole world switched over to Facebook, because it was the place you only "friended" people that you actually knew as opposed to "everyone with a pulse" that you friended on MySpace? Seems like everyone let that get away from them (and they frequently complain about how exactly that has happened to them). So instead of rushing back into the same situation, it's a great time to rethink how we're using such a service.
If I want to use bulk-import to move contacts to a more discreet sharing service, doesn't that make me the opposite of an attention whore? I doubt that most people with many contacts have acquired them for the specific purpose of seeking attention.
Problem is, Facebook is pretty much business card level today. You don't really exchange email addresses with someone you met socially, nor phone numbers: facebook is better at this.
So it's definitely not that I want less people in my friend list, just that I want to be able to easily limit what they see about me.
I don't know how those people with super high friend counts manage to eke any utility out of FB
I don't have a super high friend count on FB, but I've set up privacy levels on the friend groups I have created. I'll usually accept a friend request from anyone I know, and then add that person to a friend group, with appropriate privacy levels. A person with a large friend count could do the same thing.
I'm surprised that more people don't use this functionality on FB, but then again categorizing is fun for me (and a lot of other geeks, I presume).
I just don't feel like I can trust any privacy settings in FB. In addition to being complex, even for a technical user, when one of my friends comments on a picture or status update of a non-friend, I can see that non-friends picture or status update. This is a huge privacy hole. Also, do you use FB groups or lists?
My Android phone is synchronizing Facebook contacts out of the box.
I got a whole lot of people right now in my address book, with email addresses and even phone numbers that I didn't have before, so I'm not exactly sure what it is doing or who provided this integration, but it is doing something that works.
And then you can export all your contacts to an external SD card.
It's easier IMHO, than going with the Yahoo account route, which I couldn't get working btw.
The way Android syncs contacts with services like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Skype etc is quite interesting. The contact data isn't actually added to your phones existing contacts. It is kept seperate, but when you go to view contacts, it takes each of the contact "sources" and displays a view of them as if they have been merged. It does the "merging" based on the name of the contact.
Aw man, I just made a new Yahoo account and tried to do this and then realized Google Plus is not accepting new invites.... oh well.
I recall when Gmail was invite only and a lot of people wanted invites. People were even selling invites on eBay for a while!!! LOL... not for much money but still... it just goes to show that people will do anything for even a tiny bit of money.
So we will see how Plus works out. I am still unsure what to think about it, but either way, it seems cool. I just wish I could get an invite myself!!! :'-(
Google tried to recreated that invite scarcity with Wave as well -- didn't work out too well for them there.
Seems like the odds are pretty good that by the time they open it up to everyone, the hype will have died down. I understand the desire to scale up slowly, but this invite-only model is getting annoying.
Fyi, you may want to quickly delete your email address here as I just received a bunch of spam email, which automatically signed me up for about 15 different newsletters.
I got an invite yesterday and gave a try for half an hour. After I had seen that there is no way to import my twitter contacts, I quit it. It's very ironic for a social website to not let people join, to not let its users to connect with other people properly.
Indeed there is a disconnect between the Google+ "streams" and the old-school Buzz, which does know how to interface to Twitter. That's probably one of the worst problems with the service (which is still technically in "trial mode", for what it's worth).
That's not granular enough an explanation. They were strategic about who they let join and when, and that strategy involved admitting entire social groups at once.
Facebook used to grow methodically. There is no sensible answer of not letting people join a social community. Creating a new profile and looking for friends should be the only cost of users. It sucks to force people looking for invitations because Plus got no community. Plus got no killer feature like Gmail. Plus is not so cool, also.
I see that current Facebook users have the motivation to migrate. It's a good thing. But centralized, dominant social websites don't work anymore.
