Chimps Have Less Friends Than Humans on Facebook
There are some articles floating around today on Social networking and if it is a saturated field and some statistics on how many friends you may actually interact with online vs. offline. Good read and very educational.
Cameron Marlow, a research scientist at Facebook, shared some interesting stats on Facebook users’ social behavior patterns.
His findings: while many people have hundreds friends on Facebook, they still only actively communicate with a small few. Or to quote the author of the article, “Humans may be advertising themselves more efficiently. But they still have the same small circles of intimacy as ever.”
Here’s the data from Marlow:
The average male Facebook user with 120 friends:
* Leaves comments on 7 friends’ photos, status updates, or wall
* Messages or chats with 4 friendsThe average female Facebook user with 120 friends:
* Leaves comments on 10 friends’ photos, status updates, or wall
* Messages or chats with 6 friendsFacebook’s “In-House Sociologist” Shares Stats on Users’ Social Behavior
These circles represents circles of intimacy and is taken from the book Evolutionary Psychology by Robin Dunbar, Lousie Barrett and John Lycett. It’s called the social whirl. The number in each circle is the approximate number of people within that part of your social network. In the middle is you, followed by your family and very close friends (about 5 people). The next circle is your sympathy group, 12-15 people with whom you have a closer relationship.
The number 150 is often mentioned as the Dunbar numberW:
Social networking beyond the Dunbar number of 150 « ReachCards – the blog
Dunbar’s number is a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person. Proponents assert that numbers larger than this generally require more restricted rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable, cohesive group. No precise value has been proposed for Dunbar’s number, but a commonly cited approximation is 150.
Here is a longer article on Dunbar’s Number:
The Science of Dunbar’s Number
Dunbar is an anthropologist at the University College of London, who wrote a paper on Co-Evolution Of Neocortex Size, Group Size And Language In Humans where he hypothesizes:
… there is a cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships, that this limit is a direct function of relative neocortex size, and that this in turn limits group size … the limit imposed by neocortical processing capacity is simply on the number of individuals with whom a stable inter-personal relationship can be maintained.
Dunbar supports this hypothesis through studies by a number of field anthropologists. These studies measure the group size of a variety of different primates; Dunbar then correlate those group sizes to the brain sizes of the primates to produce a mathematical formula for how the two correspond. Using his formula, which is based on 36 primates, he predicts that 147.8 is the “mean group size” for humans, which matches census data on various village and tribe sizes in many cultures.
Life With Alacrity: The Dunbar Number as a Limit to Group Sizes
Social Network
The Social Network is based upon functional weak ties instantiated by an investment in time such as conversational inter-linked posts. An Social Nework is transactional by nature, with the means of establishing a relationship commoditized. Close to the Law of 150 in scale, a time investment is made each node to be at least peripherally concious of the other nodes and the information flow between them.
One design challenge for social software is extending the capabilities of people to hold a higher number of meaningful conversations and cultivate relationships. This is what Clay calls Blogging Classic, on steriods. The capability to extend the time and space of relationships.
Similar to the network distribution of Photography e-commerce sites category in the NEC Paper, it deviates from the Power-law.
One final graph that seems to support the social networking theory of Dunbar’s Law in this one of Ultima Online guild size distribution:
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