And that's not including Buddy Ebsen.

Cute article in the Post today on the number of buddies that kids have in their AIM Buddy Lists, and the utter amazement that parents have when they discover how many there are. The kids mentioned in this article had some 150 buddies on their lists; the parents were thinking numbers on the order of 1/10 that size.

It shouldn't be all that much of a surprise that kids have taken to new technology to make a fundamental shift in communicating: It's harder for parents to monitor instant messaging than it is to monitor phone calls, and since a lot of parents aren't even aware of instant messaging, it turns into an area of their children's lives they don't know how to begin to monitor. (Finding out how many are on the list is a good first step, followed by finding out who the list members are.)

Me? I've got 14 buddies on my list. And of them, there are 3 I've never seen online and 2 more who I haven't seen online in over a year. But then, I'm - you know - old. (And more importantly, so are my friends.)

Update: The Post's online chat about buddy lists.