DreamGrow Social Media

Dunbar: People limited to 150 friends, despite Facebook

Dunbar’s number is a limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable relationships. Relationships where an individual knows who each person is, and how those people relate each other. There is no precise value for Dunbar’s number, but it’s usually set to 150 and our brains just can’t handle more.

The advent of social networking sites has raised a question, if this number could be higher due to support from technology. Seems like a fair hypothesis.

Professor Dunbar set out to check that. Initial result show that people whit lots of friends maintain close relationships with only a small fraction of those. The Sunday Times quoted Dunbar:

The interesting thing is that you can have 1,500 friends but when you actually look at traffic on sites, you see people maintain the same inner circle of around 150 people that we observe in the real world.

Another result from the study shows that women network better than men.

There is a big sex difference though … girls are much better at maintaining relationships just by talking to each other. Boys need to do physical stuff together.

Well, I quess we already knew that, but this suggest that women have a competitive advantage in an environment where more and more business is being done through digital channels and social networking. Combining that with the fact that women rule the social web makes me wonder what’s left fof men?

When thinking about the current state of social technology I still wonder if it can be made more helpful for maintaining bigger or tighter networks. My phone helps me to remember hundreds of phone numbers and even with that information I am able to remember the connections between different people. What would happen if the developers of Facebook or other social networks would singlemindedly focus on helping to increase the Dunbar’s number in their network. Would we perceive that social networking site as better, friendlier?

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Image credit Sanja Gjenero.

I Love You!

Happy Valentine’s Day everybody. I have great friends. Actually, I am amazed how cool people are my good friends. Thank you. There are others. I don’t know them that well, but from time to time they retweet my utterings, they post comments on the blogs I write, they send emails and ask questions. Thank you, too!

Today I was thinking that I pretty much have it all and when I will make a billion dollars my life would not get a lot better (but i wont complain, I promise). Maybe I could just give back some more.

I actually had some witty and sarcastic remarks for this post about, marketing droids, the value of a brand as a friend, abusing social media, etc. But then, let’s keep it friendly today.

So, again, thanks for being my friend.

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And, of course, I love all the photographers who are generous enough to share their work on various sites without asking for anything in return. Image credit hagit.

Applying game mechanics to social media

Everyone likes games – your preference might be for the simple, like Solitare, or complex, like World of Warcraft.  If you think games are frivolous, think again – they help us accomplish the simple, like getting an infant to eat, and the complex, like warming up surgeons or disaster response.  But as in all things, moderation is key and some people have died when taking games too far. Here’s how game mechanics work.  My friend Max Kalehoff blogged about five keys of successful game design as communicated by expert Amy Jo Kim (no relation to me).  I’ll apply her framework here:

• Collecting things
• Earning points
• System feedback
• Value exchanges
• Customization and personalization

via Being Peter Kim: Applying game mechanics to social media.