Update 2014: I no longer have a Facebook page. Please see my post on quitting social media for details.

By popular request (i.e. constant nagging for the past year), I finally created a Steve Pavlina Facebook fan page. If you have a Facebook account, please feel free to friend me there by clicking the “Like” button on that page. 🙂

My regular personal Facebook page has been maxed out at 5,000 friends for more than a year, so I’ve been stuck with an ever-growing queue of hundreds of friend requests I can’t approve. I’ve only been able to add new Facebook friends as people drop off, but the waiting list always grows faster. I’m also unable to add new friends of my own choosing. Even when I drop down to 4980 friends or so, Facebook says I’m still too close to the limit to let me send out any new friend requests.

The nice thing about fan pages is that they provide essentially the same functionality as a regular Facebook page, but as far as I can tell, there’s no limit on the number of connections you can have. The best part for me is that I don’t need to manually approve requests to follow a fan page — as you might imagine, doing that for a page with thousands of requests can get a bit tedious.

I just put the Facebook fan page up within the past hour, and dozens of people have already connected to it. I suspect it will eventually overtake my personal Facebook page in terms of the number of connections.

I’m not sure what to do differently with the fan page vs. the personal one, so for now I’ll probably clone the status updates on both. In the long run, I’ll probably pay more attention to the fan page as the number of connections grows, using it as a place to stimulate discussion and feedback on a variety of ideas.

I’ve been into online social networking since 1994, so I’ve been very active on Facebook and Twitter. If you’ve seen my personal Facebook page, you’ll know that it’s quite lively.

The catalyst that finally pushed me over the edge to create a fan page was reading the book The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World by David Kirkpatrick. This is a fascinating read if you care to learn about the history of Facebook. I purchased and read it on my iPad.