Facebook Friends
Posted by Joshua Claybourn on 6 March 2009 | 3 responses
The Economist, arguably one of the top three magazines in print, posted a splendid article back in late February on the limits of a human’s circle of friends. According to anthropologists humans can only process around 150 friends, and our substantive circle of friends is quite small. Social networking sites like Facebook have provided a wonderful tool to study this in new ways:
[A]n average man – one with 120 friends – generally responds to the postings of only seven of those friends by leaving comments on the posting individual’s photos, status messages or “wall”. An average woman is slightly more sociable, responding to ten. When it comes to two-way communication such as e-mails or chats, the average man interacts with only four people and the average woman with six. Among those Facebook users with 500 friends, these numbers are somewhat higher, but not hugely so. Men leave comments for 17 friends, women for 26. Men communicate with ten, women with 16.
3 Responses to “Facebook Friends”
Of course, Facebook is just fancy twitter, or some combination of twitter and a blog. So what do you care Josh.
Oh, follow me at twitter.com/JacobTomaw.
I’ll bite. What are the other two magazines?
These studies are always interesting, but they say nothing of the upper limits of possibility — just the average (is this kind of curve normally distributed?). It’s a good rule of thumb. It would be interesting to see what an exceptional subject was capable of.