The past few days have been rough for me because I had a full friends list, and I've had to do some house cleaning.  I always feel horrible having to delete people off my list, but I like to keep it strictly at 95, so that new folks can add me should they so desire.

I write a quick note letting people know I have removed them, and why.  I try to be fair with who I remove, so I thought I would share my obsessive effective system for managing my friends list.  I have utilized this system just after starting here in the Xbox division, so it does NOT cover my entire history of live.

I have an Excel spreadsheet which includes everyone on my friends list's gamertag, website, real first name, last time I played with them on Live, number of times I played with them on Live, date I added them as a friend, and any notes.

When I add a new friend, I mark the date.  Each time I play a game with someone, I increment the proper counter, and date.  I then sort by Times Played With, Last Played With, and Date Added.  If they are at the bottom of the list, it means I haven't played many games with them on Live, and they are candidates for deletion.  Recently I have created an "inactive" tab where I move folks I have deleted as to not lose their play statistics should they want back on my friend list.

I have to take a fuzzy factor for relatives, or folks I speak with over IM/Email, but haven't played with recently, but overall this system allows me to just start deleting people from the bottom of my list.  If people find themselves deleted, they are less bummed out because they start to realize that to stay on my friends list, you have to play games with me.

I hope that helps some of you out there to know that Xbox employees feel just as much pain (if not more) with the 100 friend limit on our friend list.  My methods are a little extreme, but I get questions from many podcasters/website owners/community members on how I organize my friends list.

I would love it if Live kept these statistics for me, but until that happens, I spend more time in Excel than I should.

[Edit - I will attempt to answer the question I know I am bound to get.  There are non-trivial technical hurdles with increasing the friends list over 100.  We have heard the feedback from the community regarding adding nicknames, organizing and adding additional friend slots.  Those features are on our wish-list, but we have not announced anything at this time regarding any of those enhancements.]