All of this talk about sacrificing friends has me thinking about my out of control online friendships.
See, I’ve got lots of so-called friends. There are my 885 MySpace friends, 346 Facebook friends, 164 LinkedIn connections and 1,483 Twitter followers (of whom I follow back 1,056 of the most interesting ones).
I even actually know some of these people in real life. Of course, the majority of them are old high school pals (many of whom I didn’t consider a “friend” a decade ago), co-workers, networking folks or literally, random strangers.
Historically, if you friend me on one of these social networks, odds are I will accept immediately. But when I moved last fall, I doubt many of these so-called friends would have offered to help carry furniture up stairs (which is my ultimate friendship test).
How did I get to the point of labeling strangers as friends? Like a lot of people in this situation, I should probably spend some time pruning down this list. But I don’t. They seem harmless — for the most part — so I hoard them like an Idahoan survivalist.
Whenever I speak to groups about social network friendship, I cite Dunbar’s number — the theoretical limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person.
Sometimes called the “monkeysphere,” the approximate number for humans is 150. If you think back to grade school, you probably knew and could keep track of around 150 folks if you add up your classmates, extended family and friends.
But as we enter 2009, technology has enabled us to meet new people, locate long lost connections, and/or maintain relationships with much larger groups of people.
For example, I know the colossal stack of paper business cards I received in 2008 won’t ever get filed, however, contacts whom I connected with on LinkedIn will always be a few clicks away (and they’re self-updating and searchable!). Because of Facebook, I know tomorrow is Amy Gallagher’s birthday and plan to wish her well. In March, I’ll get a Google Calendar alert for my best friend’s wedding anniversary. Technology allows me to be a better friend in these situations.
But of the more than 2,000 friends I have across various social networks, I find it amazing that I still can only maintain a genuine relationship with a couple hundred — back to the monkeysphere again.
So you can go one of three ways.
- Prune down the riff-raff (sorry eighth-grade girlfriend)
- Use a tool like Socialminder to help you make a real-life connection with each contact on a regular interval
- Sacrifice 10 friends for a burger.
How do you build, limit and maintain your online friendships?