People who claim to have thousands of Facebook friends are really kidding themselves Photo: BLOOMBERG NEWS
For humans appear incapable of maintaining more than about 150 active relationships, according to Robin Dunbar, a professor of evolutionary anthropology.He arrived at that figure – coined 'Dunbar's number' – in the 1990s.
Recent study into how social networking sites affect Dunbar's number indicates that that advances in technology have not been matched by changes in mental capacity.
When he looked at how people use sites like Facebook, Bebo and MySpace, he found that those with lots of 'friends' only interact with a relatively small proportion of them.
"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," he told The Sunday Times.
While "people obviously like the kudos of having hundreds of friends" the reality was that their social circle was unlikely to be bigger than anybody else's.
His earlier research claimed that people limit the number of real relationships they have in complex societies, because the part of our brains that cope with language and personal interaction cannot deal with any more.
source : http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/7066454/Facebook-friends-are-virtual-finds-Oxford-University-study.html