If you send Russ Renbarger a Facebook friend request and he doesn’t accept it, don’t be offended. Chances are Renbarger wants to be your virtual pal, especially if you’re a 20-something Louisvillian who loves to party. But he simply has too many friends. No really, he does. Even Facebook says so.

Facebook has a limit of 5,000 on the number of friends one user can have. The technology occasionally allows users to float a bit above this number. Last week Renbarger boasted 5,001 friends. But if Renbarger sends you a request, when you click to confirm, you will probably get the message “Russ has too many friends.”

 Do all of these Facebook friends mean Russ Renbarger is the most popular man in Louisville?

“I hope I’m not,” Renbarger said. “With popularity comes all kinds of problems. I’m already kind of living in a fish bowl.”

Renbarger is known around town in part for his party promoting. He hosts monthly parties at Saints/SkyBar in St. Matthews and has helped put together events such as the Glass Runway fashion show and Kim Kardashian’s Derby party. And the reality series “Southern Belles: Louisville” has thrust him in the limelight even further.

A longtime friend of “belle” Hadley Hartz, Renbarger’s efforts to take that friendship to the next level has earned him screentime on the SoapNet program. Producers have attempted to portray him as a bad boy, but fans of the show don’t seem to mind; Renbarger said his Facebook friend requests went through the roof.

“Now with the TV show, it’s crazy,” he said. One day last month, for example, Renbarger received 30 Facebook friend requests.

“I had to delete several people in order to accept friend requests from people that are actually my friends,” he said. “Eventually, I gave up on that losing battle and created a new profile, directing newcomers to add that one instead.”

That’s right. In addition to the 5,000 friends on his original Facebook account, Renbarger has a second profile under “Russ Louisville Renbarger,” which, as of last week, had over 400 friends. He also has a Facebook fan page (a kind of limited profile Facebook designed primarily for businesses and celebrities) which boasts some 1,500 fans.

“The fan page was just a joke because, seriously, I’m not that grandiose or think I’m that great,” he said. “Me and some buddies were sitting around — and had probably had a couple of cocktails — and thought it would be funny to make a fan page, just to see what happens. Three weeks later, I had a thousand fans.”

If you think 5,000 Facebook friends is impressive, Renbarger’s MySpace page has more than 9 million “friends,” though he admits he cheated to get them by using a program that automatically sent friend requests to millions of users who met certain criteria.

While the thought of having 5,000 Facebook friends might seem ridiculously excessive, or just plain ridiculous, there are enough users wanting a larger friend capacity that Facebook is working on lifting the limit.

But why are so many people compelled to collect virtual friends on social networking sites?

Julia Angwin, a writer for the Wall Street Journal and author of the book “Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America,” compared collecting friends on social networking sites to scoring points in a videogame. When you join, you’re at an entry level. You befriend people who are your close friends in the real world, she said.

“Then it just becomes tempting to collect more and get to the next level and to get to the next level you have to add more friends and post on people’s walls,” Angwin explained. “You start to learn the rules of the game and the rules of the game are the more you engage, the more you put out there and the more you request friendship, the more friends you get.”

Few things in life offer such guaranteed results, she said.

“You can do all the right things in life offline and maybe not get any sort of tangible reward,” Angwin said. “It’s just human nature to want to get positive feedback. These sites provide this kind of positive feedback and, although it’s virtual, it’s satisfying.”

Branded

Long before “Southern Belles” premiered, Renbarger’s number of Facebook friends was well beyond the 120 friends held by the average user.

When Renbarger joined Facebook in late 2007, he did what anyone would do and searched for people he already knew. But Renbarger didn’t join this social networking site just so he could have virtual food fights with his buddies. (Yes, there’s actually a Facebook application for that.) As an emerging party promoter, he saw the site for exactly what it is — free advertising.

He browsed Facebook regularly, adding young River City residents he thought might be interested in attending his events, particularly hot socialites enmeshed in city nightlife.

As Renbarger’s parties became more popular, so did he. He no longer had to peruse Facebook much for friends — the party people came to him.

Renbarger still occasionally cruises around the profiles of Facebook friends looking for new faces he might want to add to his network. But most of his time on the site is spent sifting through friend requests and, of course, promoting events.

Renbarger uses his Facebook account primarily to send out messages about and invitations to his various parties and events. Users can’t send one mass e-mail to all of their friends, but Renbarger has divided his friends into groups so he can message a large number of them at once.

“With five or six clicks, I can invite 5,000 people to an event.… for free,” Renbarger said. “And not only am I reaching those people, but I’m reaching their friends and their friends’ friends, so 5,000 people quickly turn into 25,000.”

Now Renbarger is looking to take his party planning and promoting to a higher level by opening his own bar. Taking over the space formerly occupied by Dublin’s Cellar, Renbarger is opening Renbarger’s Brewhaus this weekend on Baxter Avenue. Naturally, he’s counting on Facebook to help with this new business venture. One of his recent Facebook status updates read: “Renbarger’s Brewhaus Grand Opening July 18th!! Live Music! Coxx Events, and YOU! located at 942 Baxter between Osheas [sic] and Flannigans [sic].”

It’s easy to scoff at people like Renbarger for being such shameless self-promoters, but Angwin argues that we’re all using Facebook to market some aspect of our personalities.

“You are developing your Facebook brand,” she said. “It represents what you’re trying to market at that point in your life.”

Angwin stressed that this marketing image is just one aspect of a person’s identity.

“When you’re in college, what you’re trying to market is just your status as a cool college kid,” she said. “But once you become a professional, it probably becomes how you’re marketing yourself as a professional. Or it may be that you’re marketing yourself as a really cool parent or somebody with an amazing hobby. But most people are presenting some marketing image of themselves on Facebook.”

Considering how many people Renbarger has reached out to via Facebook, he practices a coolly measured amount of restraint when it comes to opening up.

His Facebook pages may tell you that he’s a party promoter, that he’s pals with a lot of hot girls and that he’s opening a bar, but they don’t tell you much about his day job (he’s a civilian architect for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers) or his personal life in general.

“I’m careful about what I post on Facebook,” he said. “I’ve come across several Internet stalkers that are probably more interested in my life than I’d like them to be.”

There’s Something about Russ

Renbarger wants thousands of Facebook friends because it’s good for business. We get that. But why are so many people eager to befriend him as well?

Sarah Luckett has never met Renbarger, but the student at Columbia College in Chicago says being his Facebook friend helps her feel more connected to her hometown. Seriously.

 “I actually don’t know him at all, but some girlfriends and I watch the show ‘Southern Belles’ every week and my best friend was telling me that she was friends with him on Facebook,” Luckett said.

Renbarger’s status updates and event invitations to his parties, says Luckett, help her stay in the know about what’s going on in Louisville.

 “I decided I would add him just to see who he was and to get invitations to the parties,” she said. “I generally don’t add people that I’m not friends with. It was just kind of a curiosity thing and I thought it might be a good way to stay in the loop when I’m out of town.”

Markie Lynn Farnsley isn’t one to haphazardly add folks to her list of Facebook friends, either.

“I really don’t add anyone unless I know them, or know of them,” she said. “I like to keep a small amount of privacy and you never know someone’s intentions when they want to add you.”

When Renbarger sent her a Facebook friend request, however, she had no qualms about adding him even though she didn’t know him well. Farnsley is an esthetician and makeup artist by day and a bartender by night. She uses Facebook to network with potential customers, posting drink specials and her makeup artistry portfolio on her profile.

“Russ is really well known in Kentucky,” she said. “He has a large variety of friends. So, of course, it would benefit me by getting to know him. It’s all about networking.”

In other words, popularity breeds more popularity.

“And I think that’s true offline as well,” Angwin said. “When you’re a popular celebrity you get more press coverage which causes you to be more popular. It’s sort of the same. When you’re popular you get more coverage on these sites, meaning you’re going to appear more places,” such as in people’s news feeds, on their walls or tagged in photo albums. And let’s not forget that the model, singer and TV star known as Tila Tequila got her big break in part because she had so many MySpace page views.

Cohin Kakar didn’t know Renbarger well, either, when he received a friend request from him, but he’s also a party promoter and never wants to turn down a potential customer or co-collaborator. Over time, however, Kakar said he and Renbarger have become friends in the real world too.

Kakar argues that even when adding people we don’t know well, we still select our Facebook friends as we choose our friends in real life.

“When you meet someone and you see their success or just the way they carry themselves,” Kakar said, you want to become their friend. “I would say on Facebook just through a profile some people can depict that and you tend to add people sometimes just because of what you know about them, just like you would befriend somebody in person.”

And Kakar believes Renbarger’s reputation and Facebook status speak for him.

“I believe that Russ really contributed to a whole new face of nightlife here in Louisville and I can see how others who don’t know him would want to get to know him just because of all the things he’s involved in,” Kakar said. “And now he’s opening up a new brewhouse. Who doesn’t want to know the owner of a bar?”

Twitter: The next frontier

Despite his 9 million “friends,” Renbarger hasn’t logged on to his MySpace page since May 31; if you visit it, you’ll find messages prompting you to seek him out on Twitter.

“That’s what everyone is going toward,” Renbarger said, who had more than 200 followers less than two months after starting his account. “I’m trying to do what I can to put that out there.”

Taking the idea of social networking sites as games to a different level, in April, actor Ashton Kutcher challenged CNN to a popularity contest on Twitter. Kutcher and the news network set off on a race to be the first to collect a million followers. Kutcher won.

Angwin said some virtual social butterflies find Twitter more appealing than Facebook because the site offers only limited personal information about users. Thus, you can invite your real pals to join you on Facebook while speaking to the masses via Twitter.

With more than 5,000 Facebook friends — and growing — and a new obsession in Twitter, does Renbarger worry about a potential backlash? Does he want to become the Paris Hilton of the Louisville social scene, someone who is famous for being famous?

Not a chance.

“I would never worry about someone criticizing me about having too many friends, Facebook or otherwise,” he said. “Much of my success has come through networking. The larger my network, the more potential I have for future opportunities.”