Tech bloggers are a bit like navel-gazing, neurotic, trying-so-hard-to-be-cool-that-it-hurts high school kids, aren't they?

"Oh poor me! I'm just, like, way too popular for Facebook. Oh my god, 5,000 friends? That is, like, so unfair!"

Well, never fear, popular kids, Zuckerberg's magic kingdom is here to help.

Facebook will soon remove a limitation that restricts users to no more than 5,000 friend connections, someone close to the company told [TechCrunch] this week.

There are stories around why the limitation exists at all. The official reason is that Facebook wants to make sure that people only add “real” friends to their account, and the restriction is on the high end of the number of friends that any one person could reasonable have. The unofficial (and actual) reason: scaling problems made this necessary. I’ve heard this directly from Facebook employees, as have others.

But those scaling issues have been resolved, we hear from our source, and the cap will soon be lifted.

Facebook says that “less than 1,000″ users have 5,000 friends today. There are around 70 million active Facebook users, so the number of users who are affected is around one thousandth of a percent. But a disproportionate percentage of bloggers and press are at the limit, so the issue tends to get a lot more attention than it otherwise would.

Source: techcrunch.com