A researcher at Oxford University has deemed the amount of friends you have on Facebook is not actually that reflective to your friend group in real life.
Robin Dunbar, Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology, has noted that the brain can't actually handle much more then 150 friends, so having thousands of 'trophy' friends on their social network seems to be a pretty meaningless exercise.
150 isn't just a number plucked out of the ether but one which is all part of something called Dunbar's number – an idea developed in the 1990s which is based on how much information the part of the brain used for conscious thought can actually contain.
Like the kudos
"The interesting thing is that you can have 1,500 friends but when you actually look at traffic on sites, you see people maintain the same inner circle of around 150 people that we observe in the real world," explained Dunbar about his findings.
"People obviously like the kudos of having hundreds of friends but the reality is that they're unlikely to be bigger than anyone else's."
Via TechWatch
Your comments (4) Click to add a new comment
psyfur
January 25th 2010
4. Cool! I always wanted to work at the daily fail!
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wigwam_salesman
January 25th 2010
3. I really hope this researcher isn't paid out of any public funds! I have 445 "friends" on facebook. Apart from a couple of friends businesses I have met everyone at least once, but only 20 to 30 (at the most) are friends I see regularly. What a waste of time!
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drmiket
January 25th 2010
2. In news just in, Oxford University has announced a new degree "Masters of the Bleedin Obvious" - a 4 year sandwich course, with 1 year's work experience at the Daily Mail.
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bradavon
January 25th 2010
1. Ha ha. It took a professor at Oxford Uni to work out, what the rest of us knew all along.
Most Facebook friends are more acquaintances, something most Facebook users already understand.
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