NetworkAnalysis. Facebook, Dunbar's Number & Geometry - The Transportationist. NPR says: Don't Believe Facebook; You Only Have 150 Friends and discusses Dunbar's number.
Dunbar says there are some neurological mechanisms in place to help us cope with the ever-growing amount of social connections life seems to require. Humans have the ability, for example, to facially recognize about 1,500 people. Now that would be an impressive number of Facebook friends. Facebook, Dunbar’s Number and current killer apps.
British anthropologist Robin Dunbar conducted research in the 1990s on the optimum social network size for primates.
It turns out that there is a correlation with neocortex volume – the bigger the brain, the bigger the possible social network. This stands to reason, since being able to recognise faces and to know the pecking order for everyone in the group takes brain power. For humans, Dunbar’s Number is approximately 150. This means that to be able to know each member in a community and to know where they fit in that community, we are limited to about 150 as the community size.
Validation of Dunbar's Number in Twitter Conversations. OMG: brains can’t handle all our Facebook friends. Backstrom-2008-preferential. Preferential behavior in online groups. Publication Type: Conference Paper Source: WSDM '08: Proceedings of the international conference on Web search and web data mining, ACM, New York, NY, USA, p.117–128 (2008) Keywords:
Cameronmarlow.com. Social networks: Primates on Facebook.