Merrell Ligons Back in Media and Loving It

Dunbar’s Number and Facebook

Earlier this week I was going through my Facebook friends list and realized that I didn't really know half the people.  Why had I connected with so many people I didn't really know?  At some point having Facebook friends had become like a collection of marbles, It became more about quantity of connections than quality of the connections.  There's nothing wrong with having a lot of connections, as a matter of fact having a lot of connections is a good thing especially in business but can the idea be taken too far?  Not only can it be taken too far but I think the ease of online social networks like Facebook to connect people make it easier to get carried away could someday be the undoing Facebook.

There is a theoretical number of social connections that is optimal, it's called Dunbar's Number, generally said to be 150.  "These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person".  Once you get above this number it becomes more difficult to nurture all the relationships.  When your Facebook friends list gets too large you need to start categorizing people by creating customized lists or subgroups, you have to start adding rules such as who's allowed to see what, you start to lose touch with some people in list because of all the updates.  If you don't believe me then why are the Lists and Privacy Settings on Facebook so sophisticated?  It's because at some point we just accumulate too many connections. Once we surpass our optimal number of connections then the entire network becomes tedious to manage, full of irrelevant chatter and ultimately unreliable and irrelevant.

The key to maintaining a meaningful Facebook friend list and a meaningful Online Social Network is to limit your connections to only those relationships that are most meaningful.  Avoid initiating connections just for the sake of seeing your friends list grow.  What would happen if you were only allowed to have 150 connections for free on Facebook then had to pay to have more?  Would you be more selective with the people you choose to connect with or would you just befriend the first 150 people that asked for an invite to connect?  You would probably be more selective about who you chose to connect with, right!  So pay more attention to the quality of your Facebook connections and the relationship behind them.