No matter how many Facebook friends or Twitter followers people have, the truth is they can only maintain strong relationships to approximately 150 of them, about the same number as in their offline lives.
Human friendship and interaction has evolved over the last several years with the emergence of social networks like Facebook and Twitter, but the human brain's ability to manage relationships past a certain number seems to have remained steadfast.
In the 1990s, long before social media, British anthropologist Robin Dunbar studied both primate groups and human social groups throughout history. As primate brain mass increased, Dunbar noted the number of members in their groups increase. In regards to humans, he analyzed groups throughout history, including Neolithic farming villages and units in ancient and modern army groups, and found the size consistently reached around 150, the same as on social network amounts.
"This finding suggests that even though modern social networks help us log all the people with whom we meet and interact, they are unable to overcome the biological and physical constraints that limit stable social relations," said Goncalves and his colleagues.
Some social network users may realize Dunbar's findings but have a difficult time cutting the number of networking friends, so companies have developed software to assist them.
For example, the new "Path" app ranks a Facebook user's contacts to show with whom they have the strongest connection, analyzing network activity including "likes," photo tags and other features, and then suggests a list of "close" friends. The app also creates an "exclusive" list of 50 friends, attempting to return intimacy to social networking.
Color, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based mobile social networking site allows people in close proximity, whether the person knows them or not, share photos, videos and text automatically with multiple smartphones. The service incorporates the speed and immediacy of Twitter with the multimedia aspects of Facebook.
People cannot handle more than 150 social networking connections, but that has not stopped them from trying to win the race for the most Facebook friends and Twitter followers. Luckily, there's an app for that.
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