Well, it's nice to know that I'm not the only one doing this :-) ...

Jackie Spinner writes for The Age: Click for clique - www.theage.com.au: "Counting friends — the contest"

Mike Nguyen admits he’s addicted. Nearly every day for the past five months, the 27-year-old has logged on to count his friends and the friends of his friends. And their friends. At last check, he was up to 210,185 in all.

Lawyer Andy Kamage, 31, has been counting for only a few weeks. She is connected to a mere 17,000 people, or “friendsters”, the term for cyber-acquaintances made through Friendster.com, an online networking service that has burst on to the urban hipster scene this year.

Friendster was conceived as a twist on online dating, but many have treated it as a giant parlour game to see who’s connected to the most people. “It helps you quantify how popular you are,” says Jen Chung, 26, a New York marketing strategist who has 432,475 friendsters. “People get bent out of shape if someone they don’t think is as cool has more friends.” As with all flashing pop-culture trends, Friendster has already spawned a backlash. There’s a website called Introvertster that bills itself as “an online community that prevents stupid people and friends from harassing them online”. Duncan Watts, a Columbia University sociologist and the author of Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age, says people are “deeply fascinated about how they are connected to each other.

“It’s a funny obsession,” says Watts. “But they’re obsessed in a way that doesn’t require them to think about it very much … a momentary pleasure.” Nguyen got hooked on Friendster after a friend sent him an email asking him to join. “Next thing I know, I’m on it, and it’s become a pseudo-obsession.” “Kamage, who has never met Nguyen but is connected to him through his cousin, said she would never sign up for an online dating service.

“It’s free entertainment,” she says. “It’s an interesting diversion.”