I was friending some new DishyMix Fans on Facebook this weekend and came across Seth Godin and clicked to “friend” him.

I got a pop up that took me aback. It said “Seth already has too many friends.” Well, harumph. I guess I’m too late to the party, eh?

I thought I was Seth’s friend. See by DishyMix interview with Seth on his (according to me) best book so far, “Meatball Sundae.”
If you know me at all, you know that to me, a stranger is just a friend I haven’t met yet. So I was wierded out by this “error” message. How can you have too many friends? I sure can’t.

I got rejected by a pop up. Gak! And it looks like he’s going to punch me if I try to get past the blocker message too.

Did he have so many friends that Facebook won’t allow him any more? Is it a Facebook limit? Is Facebook deciding that Seth has enough friends? In the global Internet world, we are amassing large connections of friends, acquaintences and followers.

It will be interesting to see how we manage these groups. I believe they’ll be a second generation of applications that helps us intelligently group our contacts into circles. One of the first and best implementations I’ve seen of this concept was Spoke Software. When they launched they crawled your address book and inbox and made some intelligent guesses about who the people were in your contact list that you were closest too, judging by frequency and duration of communications.

It mapped out a scatter chart of your contacts with you as the center pin and your connections in a constellation around you so you could visualize your relationships. For someone like me, who interacts with a large and ever changing list of people, this was a very helpful point of data.

As I amass 3,000 friends in Facebook, 3,000 friends in LinkedIn, 1,500 followers in Twitter et cetera, et cetera, I will need tools that help me keep close connections with the insiders as well as continued conversations with all those to whom I’m connected.

If you are working on technology that overlays these existing services and helps organize contacts, please let me know.

In the meantime, here’s Seth’s interview. Dude is smooth!

Seth Godin, Leader of the New Marketing Movement on Authenticity, Google Dicing and Orange Rubber Squids