May 2, 2007 02:58 PM
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NICK DOUGLAS — MySpace profiles are boring — so what if you're "friends" with Christina Aguilera? So are over 400,000 people. But Facebook? Now that might mean a little. Are you friends with one of the most powerful bankers in the world? Well, Facebook says no. But you might be a couple of degrees from one.
Herb Allen, host of the annual Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference, only has thirteen registered friends. One of those is Jim Breyer, an investor from Accel Partners who's on the boards of Wal-Mart, Marvel Entertainment, and (ah, of course!) Facebook. What can we learn from the friend lists of bigshots like this?
Herb Allen: Attendees at the banker's annual conference include Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and the chair of Time Warner. But his thirteen Facebook friends (well below the usual "cool but not a ho" number of 40-100) include different big names, like Matthew Barney, one of America's foremost artists, and Craig Forman, executive VP of Earthlink and a former Yahoo VP.
(Forman is friends with Stewart Alsop, a venture capitalist who's friends with Facebook founding president Sean Parker and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. He's also friends with my boss, Gawker Media publisher Nick Denton, who probably asked me to write this piece just to see his name in his own blog again, the wanker.)
Jim Breyer: Allen's friend, a Facebook board member, is less picky, with a friend roster of 402. Some are big names like Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, but what strikes me is how many 20-somethings are his friend. Many of them work for Facebook, of course, but plenty don't. It's nothing uncouth, obviously; Breyer must just be pretty fly for a middle-aged guy. Maybe he's helping the next generation relive the dot-com glory days that he told PBS about in 2001.
Jim Bankoff: A friend of Breyer and Allen, AOL's EVP of Programming keeps a fair-enough friend list of 51. His friends list shows he's deep in the Web 2.0 scene (or at least knows everyone who is) and befriends plenty of startuppers and tech journalists. Friends include entrepreneurs Marc Canter (creator of social site People Aggregator) and Tarik Krim (creator of newsreader Netvibes), as well as Yahoo Senior VP Brad Garlinghouse, blog publisher Om Malik, Wall Street Journal columnist Kara Swisher, Techmeme creator Gabe Rivera, startup investor Jeff Clavier, and my boss Denton again, as well as Bankoff's former colleague (and Denton's frenemy and former competitor) Jason Calacanis. While Jason has a profile shot with Perez Hilton, he's not Perez's friend, as the world's most famous gossip blogger doesn't have a Facebook profile. Thank God, because no one in this network wants to be three degrees from Perez Hilton's crowd.
Nick Douglas writes for Valleywag, Prezzish, and Look Shiny. Despite being a total dick, the Facebook slut has 196 friends.
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