You are not as popular as you think you are

Everyone thinks they know how many friends they have on mySpace ... Everyone's friends are divided in groups of forty. If you have 1-40 friends it will take up one page on the view all friends page... if you have 41-80 it will be on second page. It follows like this:
1 - 40 will be on page 1
41 - 80 will be on page 2
81 – 120 will be on page 3
121 – 160 will be on page 4
161 – 200 will be on page 5
I stopped at two hundred because I figure not many people have more than two hundred friends on mySpace. Each page friend page looks something like this:
.____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____
| 1 || 2 || 3 || 4 || 5 || 6 || 7 || 8 |
|____||____||____||____||____||____||____||____|
.____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____
| 9 || 10 || 11 || 12 || 13 || 14 || 15 || 16 |
|____||____||____||____||____||____||____||____|
.____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____
| 17 || 18 || 19 || 20 || 21 || 22 || 23 || 24 |
|____||____||____||____||____||____||____||____|
.____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____
| 25 || 26 || 27 || 28 || 29 || 30 || 31 || 32 |
|____||____||____||____||____||____||____||____|
.____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____
| 33 || 34 || 35 || 36 || 37 || 38 || 39 || 40 |
|____||____||____||____||____||____||____||____|

Many people many notice that on each one of their friend's pages there are a few people missing. The thing is that for every page there are supposed to be forty friends and if you have any empty spaces mySpace still counts those empty spaces as friends. Thus if you go through and count each and every friend manually you will notice that your friend count is over counted by those empty spaces. The problem gets exponentially worse the more pages of friends you have. I use the word "exponentially" because I was taught it in math class. And that is the first time I have used it in a sentence. The funny thing is that the more friends that you think you have the less popular you really are. I first discovered this problem many months back with a friend of mine and we stayed on the phone for hours trying to figure it out but we could not figure it out. Finally I got something...
What happens is this... If you accept someone as a friend and then their profile is deleted you will never notice because the count wont change. If you go back to your edit friends page you will notice that there are profiles with a big "X" next to them they will say "DELETED -This profile no longer exists." If you delete them you will finally see how many friends you really have.
Once you do this reply to this post and tell me how many friends you thought you had and how many you really had. That should be fun...


Extra Reading