If You've Got More Than 150 Facebook Friends, They're No Friends at All

New research is suggesting that if you're friends with over 150 people on Facebook, the extras are meaningless.

This is a conclusion of some thinking by Oxford professor of evolutionary anthropology Robin Dunbar. Dunbar's theory is that it can only handle a maximum capacity of roughly 150 ongoing, fully interactive friendships. If you know or are "friends" with more people than this, then actually you're probably merely acquaintances instead. Dunbar's original research was based on people engaged in face-to-face, flesh and blood friendships...so he's updated it to consider the possibility that online friendships could actually enable a larger number of friends. His new research looked at the traffic of people with thousands of online friends to those with hundreds of pals or less. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given then very biological roots of his theory, it looks like Dunbar's 150 friend figure even holds true for online relationships--even with the ease and speed of the Internet, you can't overcome your basic brain programming relating to how many people you can be friends with. And that means that all those folks with hundreds or even thousands of Facebook friends aren't really friends with that many people at all. A bit of common sense thinking would suggest the same conclusion, of course, but to see it measured at a limit of merely 150 is a bit of a surprise.