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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I enjoyed the post.
I probably communicate with fewer than 30 people via facebook. I look forward to graduating so I can unfriend a good number of my 600 something Facebook friends. Being on such a large campus I run into a lot of people on any given day.
I won’t unfriend high school friends, good college friends or kids from PR classes. But those people you met at that party one time, but had a class with last semester; they’re gone. I think having a lot of Facebook friends is an attempt at a social courtesy. That will still leave me with solid network of at most 300 people. Of those people I will probably still only communicate with 30, but its a better ratio and much less cluttered.
Facebook is a good way to maintain interpersonal contact with those you see rarely. It enables you to stay informed on the little things so you can maintain a semblance of closeness with limited time which is key with varying schedules and time zones.
Hey Blake,
I just got into Facebook about a month ago (about the same time I started blogging and twittering). One of the first things I noticed was how many “friends” everybody had, and how many friend requests I started receiving from people I didn’t care about. For people I truly had no interest in communicating with (and yes, this included a large number of high school acquaintances), I just ignored their requests. I can’t imagine that somebody who really didn’t care about me in high school would all of a sudden be offended that I never “friended” them on Facebook. It’s a simplistic approach for sure, but it does allow me to avoid the “inner circle” problem, since by default, almost all of my Facebook friends *are* my inner circle. And I totally agree with your “stalking tool” comment…
-DNatt
Darren,
There are certainly two distinct types of people on Facebook: Those who accept everyone and those who accept only their friends. When I started college I accepted everyone’s friendship, and then as the years went on I realized that I didn’t even really know most of the people I was friends with. At that point though it was too late and I just started editing my privacy settings to protect my content. Now only my “inner circle” is privy to my photos and status updates.
Thanks for your comment!
Instead of unfriending people you dont know well, create a “Friend Group” called “I dont really know them.” Set the settings for this Friend Group to the basic minimum – then hide these friends. This way, they are still in your social network, but you dont see their posts AND they dont see your information.
Why do this? Because there is nothing more powerful than networking. This person may work at a company you want to work at some day. Or perhaps they will work in a ticket office where you need tickets. Or perhaps they will know somebody you want to be introduced to.
If somebody wants to be your friend and you dont know them, YOU are at the advantage. They want to know you, so when the time comes for you to call in a favor, they will be there for you. I think it is narrow minded to use social media just to communicate with friends. It is the way to communicate period. Why watch the news on TV where you dont know ANYBODY in the stories. I’d rather read the newsfeeds of people I know, even if I just sorta know them, and even if I I sorta know somebody they know. Just my two cents.