Omo mehn, people, I'm asking this question cuz it seriously beats my understanding.
And in honesty, my deep curiosity only arose last week.

A childhood friend of mine posted a status message, last week, about his state of mind. So naturally, I went over there to weigh in my 2 cents. And just 6 minutes after posting on his status, I got a friendship request from Linda, one of his friends. Me I no sabi who she be at first, but in order to avoid being tagged an 'unsociable Ice Lord', I accepted the babe o. Now, like any natural guy who just received an extended hand of friendship from a stranger, na im I say make I explore her profile small. And to my consternation, looking at her friends list, wetin I find na '3994 Friends'!
Now, I'm in no way disputing the possibility of a person having that many friends, but ol' boy dis one really shock me. Looking at this girl's status messages, the highest feedback wey she don ever get na 3 Comments! - OK, out of all the 3994, na only 2 people send this girl? (The third comment was actually hers, so you can imagine) - reason this kind thing o. Anyway, I say make I bone that reasoning sha, as comments don't always serve as barometer.
But returning to this girl's wall, I discovered she'd just added 11 new friends, and out of those new friends, my mother, brother, colleague and second cousin follow! - People she just saw from looking at my profile -- People she has never met! Na waa oh! All in all, I say make I just bone that thing shaa, as it depends on a person's social preference.
But then, returning to my homepage, na im I come realize say I don get two new friendship requests! - and these two new people (two girls) na friends supposedly belonging to the girl.
Looking at their profiles again, na im I come discover say one of them get 4277 friends, while the other get 4893 friends!! What dah hell! Looking at the second girls friends list, these are the people I found:

- Siba Han (a spam bot known to spam people's status messages with links about the disccovery of the "Al Dajjal" - some islamic demon - I dunno)
- Mir Faizan (a fat, hairy Israeli old man in panties, known to post on fanpage walls saying "Add me!"
- Nike Sporting Apparel!! Nuff said.

Most times, I wonder what the homepages of such people are going to look like, with so many thousands of stauts message surging through their screens every nanosecond.
Hey, granted, there are people who may have this many friends but still genuinely know and interact with them - but I get the feeling that majority of the people with so many Facebook friends are under the impression that it makes them appear 'popular' - if you ask me, it's quite a turn off - but then again, it's just my opinion. I want to know yours.

So, what's on your mind regarding this issue?

I get your point. I see a lot of people on FB who get a kick out of amassing a gigantic friends list. Mostly from people they barely know. From what I observed, some of these people are physically attractive chicks who get lots of attention and obviously tend to get a lot of requests. So what they probably do is to just constantly hit the "accept" tab.

Me, I just put such behaviour down to juvenile exuberance. Much the same way I feel about people who inflate their number of Nairaland posts (with inconsequential stuff like "hmmm, na wa o", "ok" or even "." Or those who pine about having their topics put on the homepage.

Not really!