What Do You Do When You Reach Facebook's 5,000-Friend Limit?

Because the interface is a million times easier than the one for this site, I've long used Facebook for what amounts to blogging. (The items also automatically show up on my Twitter feed, which doesn't happen here.) But I'm starting to run up against Facebook's limit of 5,000 friends--a term they take much more literally than I'd prefer. What they want you to do in this case is create a "Fan" page. But I like the mixture of readers I've never met with my college friends, family members, and actual, as opposed to FB, friends, colleagues, and acquaintances. And I agree with Omar Wasow's point, made in a FB thread on this topic, that Fan pages force you into a different, and unwanted, relationship with your FB correspondents. He writes:

Has anyone read a good overview of how to deal with the 5,000 "friend" limit? For a while, I accepted any request. Now, I accept almost none as I'm over 4,000 "friends" and, according to facebook, I've got 1,029 friend requests in the queue. Setting up a "fan" page seems entirely wrong as that would be an even more inaccurate description of my relationship to many acquaintances. Also, while I have a modest public profile (I used to do some work in TV), I really dislike the idea of a "fan" page as that seems to suggest I think of myself as a celebrity (which in my current role as a lowly grad student and aspiring prof is clearly not the case).

So does anyone have an alternative?

What Do You Do When You Reach Facebook's 5,000-Friend Limit?

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