Bill Gates Dumps Facebook: “Too Many Friends”

Bill Gates confessed at an event in New Delhi today that he gave up on Facebook because he couldn’t keep up with the friend requests. Gates remarked that there were “10,000 people wanting to be my friends” after he tried out the service, and it was time consuming to decide if he “knew this person, did I not know this person”.

Gates was speaking at a gathering to accept the Indira Gandhi Prize for Peace, Disarmament and Development on behalf of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In addition to saying that Facebook “was just way too much trouble so I gave it up”, the AFP story on the event quotes Gates as saying he’s “not that big at text messaging”. The Microsoft co-founder also mentioned that he doesn’t spend all day using technology and that “All these tools of tech waste our time if we’re not careful.”

And while Gates insists that he’s “not a 24-hour-a-day tech person”, it’s clear that a growing number of Facebook users are – it’s the very reason why Microsoft has a stake in the networking giant, as users’ time and attention are increasingly consumed by these somewhat addictive services.

We have no idea what Bill Gates’ Facebook () page looks like, but we’d like to imagine it’s similar to this hilarious mockup, courtesy of PC World: