How Many Friends Can You Really Have on Facebook?
According to Cameron Marlow, Facebook's "in-house sociologist," that number is four if you are male and six if you are female. As the Economist reports this morning, Marlow's research indicates that the average Facebook user has a network of about 120 friends, but only has two-way conversations with a very small subset of these 'friends.' Interestingly, even for those users who have a far larger number of friends (500+), those numbers barely grow (ten for men and sixteen for women).
Those numbers cited above are for friends that users actually email or chat with. When it comes to more casual one-way interactions like leaving comments on photos, status updates, or writing on somebody's wall, those numbers increase slightly and the average male would then have seven friends on Facebook and the average female about ten.
Based on this data, Marlow argues that once your network grows beyond the Dunbar number of 150 (the theoretical cognitive limit of how many people one can maintain a stable social relationship with), you are, at best, increasing the number of 'casual contacts' that you track passively.
What About Twitter?
Marlow, of course, focuses only on Facebook, but these numbers are also quite interesting in the context of other social services like Twitter. Just this week, we saw a an interesting discussion about how many followers one can really interact with on Twitter - especially considering that some users there follow tens of thousands of people.
While some of these numbers for Facebook probably also hold true for Twitter, it also needs to be acknowledged that Twitter is a far more casual network than Facebook, where users just dip in and out of the message stream during the day. Also, the concept of 'friendship' in general also seems to be more loosely defined on Twitter.
But if you really wanted to have a two-way communication with most or your Twitter followers, then following 10,000 people is simply crazy. However, those Twitter addicts who follow this many users probably also only really track a very small subset of their followers through groups on Tweetdeck and searches.
Share
Facebook
Comments
Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all ReadWriteWeb posts
This is great data, although it was already presupposed by Robin Dunbar some time ago. (Check out dunbar's number on wikipedia.)
What about the flow of friends on facebook? What percentage of friends in one's network are in constant flux?
Interesting statistics, but does anyone really join Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, etc. in order to broaden their close personal contacts? My guess is that people join these sites and gain "friends" in an attempt to promote themselves in some way.
~T the D
http://thedrunkelephant.blogspot.com/
"Friending" @ Twitter beyond a few hundred is to grow a business network. Growing these friends into the thousands is like growing an e-mail list. I find it interesting that Facebook has kept the friend limit to 5,000 forcing many "people-based" consultant businesses to get fan pages. But, no matter, the definition of online "friend" has changed. Personally, I like that it's more transparent than it was even five years ago.
After a certain point it stops adding value and starts being ridiculous.
To say that comments/wall posts/etc. are "one-way communication" demonstrates a lack of understanding. Many people post comments with the intention of starting a conversation. Similarly, there are (better) alternatives for messaging and chat outside of facebook. I don't think that's a very good basis for comparison. Public vs. private is more accurate.
this is an interesting article. I am beginning to feel like FB is used to see how many friends one can actually get. It's sort of like myspace, approving everyone. I just didn't know the numerical information behind it. So this article was def. interesting.
This is interesting info, and I would like to see this broken down by age demographic. I would venture to guess these numbers are much higher for younger people verses older Facebook users.
As an early Facebook adopter and avid user, I think there's also a layer missing here that in regards to my closer friends, I definitely look at their content, and might make what this report considers "casual" contact, but for our significant communication I go to other mediums. Either external email, gchat, AIM, phone or text.
The people that I Facebook chat or message with it's because they are part of my less intimate network and I generally don't have other contact information for them that I use regularly (meaning that I probably wouldn't text them on the phone number I got off their Facebook profile, or email them at the address their profile provides).
So from my experience, the Facebook friends that I value the most, have the most personal connection with, and who's content I look at first, I rarely, if ever, communicate with in the manner this report uses to determine "friendship."
Similar post about the size of social networks as it relates to LinkedIn:
http://www.360kid.com/blog/2008/08/who-are-the-people-in-your-neighborhood-exploring-the-size-of-social-networks/
Probably my biggest single irritation with FB/MS is the word 'friend'. I know who my friends are. My contacts on FB/MS might overlap with my friends, but online status is totally different than friendship. And in an industry that makes up new phrases at the drop of a hat, repurposing a perfectly good word for what is essentially an address book.
Twitter is a lot more authentic, in my opinion, in calling it 'following'. That is a fairly accurate term.
This makes me feel better about not keeping in touch with a large portion of my "friends". For a while, I thought I was anti-social!
I suspect that the Dunbar number is evolving as we speak.
I agree with the overall idea here, but the two networks provide different value and work in different ways.
Past a certain number of followers, Twitter becomes a giant free-for-all of data which you can somewhat control by who you follow. Without tools to filter the flow, you have no hope of meaningful conversations, but you can build reputation and build connections which can translate into other realms. Twitter is not symmetric; you don't have to care about me just because I want to read what you have to say.
You can't really compare it to Facebook, where every connection is symmetric and the system exists mainly to support already-made connections. You very rarely make new connections in Facebook, mainly because every connection must be symmetric.
I don't see how we can compare Facebook and Twitter.
At Facebook most of the persons in the list are people who you know personally (at least to some degree)
At twitter, it's persons you are interested in following.
IMO, I've found it much easier and faster to interact on Twitter than on Facebook. I add people on Facebook only once I know them well enough.
@T the D: you obviously don't use Facebook then. Now I'm sure there are lots of users on FB for the exact reason you mentioned, and maybe even the majority of users are like that, but everyone I know on FB, including myself, is on there to keep in better contact with extended friends and family. Most of my "friends", which currently numbers are 54 (so I'm looking at a miniscule user base), are either relatives or former classmates from high school. And true to the article's point there are only a few of those that I really pay attention to. But even then I rarely have much interaction with them on FB beyond a comment or wall-to-wall or two -- most of my meaningful contact is done through either phone, email, or IM/chat (outside of FB). For me, FB is simply a way to keep up to date with what's going on in everyone's lives.
If any of you guys want to see the charts that I used in my article (I'm the author of that piece in The Economist), they're here.
Interesting numbers, and I find them absolutely true. How many people have "Actual Friends" on Facebook. Friends are people that you have lots in common with and keep in contact with on a regular basis. I don't see how some people can have over 150, 250 or even 500+ friends. IT will take you all day to have a conversion with just half of them. I think they are more like distant people I know.
What about twitter, can you really follow and read and comprehend 1500 or even 2500 followers.
As someone else commented, its all about self promotion isn't it.
My friend list is about 100 people on Facebook.
I think that is enough for me.
I've heard the stats on Dunbar's number tossed around a lot, but I think the important thing to realize is not all "friends" are equal.
I have nearly 400 "friends" on facebook. They fall into unique sub-groups. For example, on Facebook, I have actual, realy bonifide friends; my sister, husband, parents, relatives; then I have a sub-group of people who read my parenting blog; I have a subgroup of people who read my save the media blog.
I have a subgroup of my college friends; I have a subgroup of my elementary school friends; I have a subgroup of my work friends.
I might spend most of my time with my "real" friends and family, but I interact in different ways with the various subgroups. My blog readers may comment on my status updates that are links to the various blogs they read, so I'm connecting with them in that way in a very easy, low-impact way. But I might not be writing on their walls everyday or even once a month.
I think Facebook friends are microcosm of our friends in real life -- some or tight tell everything to friends, some of are hang out at the movies with friends, some are bitch about work friends, some are say hi in the hall friends.
For me, that works.
Been using Twitter for quiet some time now and already gaining followers, my next step is to have an FB account. Thanks for the info.
I agree 100% with what Morgan said just above : the word "friend" is just inadequate and a lot too imprecise. It's not that you have a hierarchy of "friends" but rather that Facebook calls a mere acquaintance a "friend", while friendship relates to that small group of people "you can discuss important matters with".
For the rest and in particular the view we can have of Twitter on the matter, I believe the end of that article in The Economist sums it all pretty well :
"people who are members of online social networks are not so much “networking” as they are “broadcasting their lives to an outer tier of acquaintances who aren’t necessarily inside the Dunbar circle,” says Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project"
"Social networking" is essentially advertising ourselves : we surely get to see what others do/think/whatever, but why we do it is primarily because we want people we know (even remotely) to be aware of what WE are doing/thinking/whatever. And that's not necessarily out of pride for ourselves but it can be because we genuinely think what we do/think/whatever is of public interest (just as it is to leave a comment on this blog right now) - and I remember Sarah Perez writing a very good piece about that on this blog (http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/technology_is_great_but_are_we_forgetting_to_live.php)
Not answered in the story, so far as I can tell, is whether Marlow evaluated only two-way conversations through Facebook -- as I don't think of Facebook messaging as "email" nor "chat", and I do have two-way conversations (face-to-face or via SMTP email, AIM, ICQ, GChat, IRC, etc.) with far more than 4 of the 600+ listed as my Facebook Friends.
(Amusingly and frustratingly, RWW has this nice "Connect with Facebook" icon prominently displayed in the comments section, but when I tried to use it? Facebook said the API key for the application had expired. Seems this FacebookConnect thing hasn't been fully worked through yet.)
Now, my FB friend list includes cow-orkers, high school classmates, college classmates, childhood friends, bands I enjoy, other bands whose members I am actually friends with, people I see only at annual and semi-annual events but whom I've seen and socialized with there for 10+ years
grrrrr.
that comment was not completely written, and I clicked *Preview* not *Submit.*
I think I'll leave the rest of my thoughts for another day, when RWW's comment tools have been repaired.
re: "But if you really wanted to have a two-way communication with most or your Twitter followers, then following 10,000 people is simply crazy."
Unless, of course, a priority notation system were in common use:
http://bit.ly/BangPriority
Could it be that lots of people sing up and then never use the site or don't use it regularly to communicate? Maybe they use email or IM instead of Facebook to communicate.
______________________
stHrt.com
Change Your Home Page
http://sthrt.com
5,000 is the actual limit on Facebook.
It's interesting to read some facts to go along with what most already thought. Most online friends are much more "acquaintance" than "friend".
That said, I'm certain many people are truly thankful for these sites for rekindling older friendships.
I have a lot :P I don't know how many you can have :S
OK this is the 3rd search result I've found and read.. not one can answer HOW MANY FRIENDS WE CAN HAVE lol.
I have a feeling it's either 500, 1000, or 5000?
Lou Sparx