You're missing what I'm saying. The number of friends is no longer anywhere near accurate. It's not an over-estimate, in fact it's always going to be far, far less than the true value.

Look at it like this....

1) You have "x" number of real friends.

2) Only "y" percent of them report themselves - the rest are *invisible*.

"y" is decreasing rapidly as more and more peers stop reporting to pings. This now includes most major Gnutella apps - Gnucleus had little choice but follow suit. A connection showing zero friends may in fact have thousands.

I understand what you're saying - even if the friend count worked it's not the absolute best way to judge a connection, but it no longer works at all!

Guntella peers have no idea how many friends they're connected to anymore. It's now about as meaningless as just picking a random number.

If you ask me, once the Gnutella developers reached this decision, they should have just removed the friend count entirely - it does nothing but confuse people now.