There was a really interesting post on Inside Facebook today from Cameron Marlow, a research scientist at Facebook. The post explained how the Dunbar Number, which says that you can’t be friends with more than 150 people applies to Facebook as well.
The paradox lies in the fact that almost everyone has more than 150 friends on Facebook, I even have somewhere around 1,000. So does the Dunbar Number not apply to me?
Of course it does, the researcher found out that:
The average female Facebook user with 500 friends:
- Leaves comments on 26 friends’ photos, status updates, or wall
- Messages or chats with 16 friends
According to Inside Facebook, that is only 5-7% of your friends who you actually communicate with through Facebook.
This leads me to the conclusion, now more than ever, that Facebook is much more of a stalking tool then a tool to communicate with your friends. For some reason, human behavior leads us to want information on people who we aren’t even really friends with.
Do you communicate with more than 5-7% of your friends on Facebook?
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