I have quite literally never heard anyone brag even jokingly, or for that matter even mention their friend count on Facebook. The few friend counts I've noticed and remembered, including my own, have all hovered around 150-200. I think his claim that Facebook friend count is a motivating popularity metric like Twitter's follower count is spurious.
I have about 200 friends, I have met all of them in real life, I occasionally add new people, but I also remove people when I realize I don't care about them and what they do. I care about my friend count, but in the opposite way, I want to keep it low, and meaningful. The same is true for most of my friends. Most of them only add other people they actually know.
As for posting, neither me nor my friends use Facebook for chatting. It's photos and status updates about what we are doing or going to do. It's almost never questions, only statements. Then again, me and my friends are in our mid-thirties, none of us "grew up" with Facebook, none of us used it at university, and the common topics are work and kids and vacations.
I have a number of friends on Facebook that are younger around 20, extended family and the like, and they use it in a completely different way: They add more friends. They never remove friends. They have no critera for friends other than "doesn't dislike", it doesn't matter if they don't know the person well or not.
They also use it a lot more for public chatting. Someone posts a status update, and then two or three people have an unrelated conversation in the comments to that, because... it's an input field and it was there and they know the relevant friends will see it.
And that's just two different ways of using it, I'm sure there are a myriad more and I have absolutely no idea which way is the most common. But it's pretty clear from your post, and from the piece by Arrington that both of you bring your own biases into it. You both think that most other people have the same Facebook experience as you do.
So Arrington goes "Facebook sucks for me, therefore all of Facebook is broken!". You're much, much less egocentric, but still, I wouldn't make the bet that you did that the grandparent post's view was unique. :-)
I very quickly shot up to 150 friends and have only recently, years later, broken 200. I don't expect it to accelerate any time soon.
I don't go out of my way to delete people I don't speak to, but I do lose friends over time, either people removing me, or people deleting facebook. The rate at which I lose friends is just slightly slower than the rate that I'm adding friends.
