Is 150 Still the Magic Number?
Posted on 06. May, 2009 by Jason Chan in Social Media
One of the great things about the social network craze has been the number of raw new connections one can make through seemingly ethereal means. Between all of the requisite networks, I’ve somehow managed to create hundreds of connections to people whom I’ve worked with, met informally and shared something in common. Yet, over the last couple of years, things had been getting out of hand and it’s simply impossible to maintain quality relations with them all. I was spending more and more time trying to keep up instead of actually furthering the relationships, so I stopped accepting new Facebook friends and turned up the privacy settings.
As it turns out, there is something called the Dunbar’s number, 150, which according to Wikipedia “is a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships.” This has come out of hundreds of years of communities developing and growing. Once they reach around 150, they need to split off and form new ones. This principle has been applied to many different areas of business, including organizational design and company growth patterns. Companies like Intel and Microsoft have taken this to heart, which explains how their corporate campuses consist of many small buildings rather than huge single monoliths.
Enter Scoble’s Number. It is a new way of looking at social interactions. Instead of the focus on “stable social relationships” it is more about setting up types of relationships and having different levels of engagement and expectations for each. This dramatically expands the absolute number of people you potentially communicate with. So, unless you allocate more time to maintaining your network, this setup reduces the amount of interaction you have with each of them — something has got to give.
Perhaps this is the way forward; segment the type of connections you have and maintain a larger set of weaker connections for a diversity of opinion. As social networks continue to expand, this may well be the future. [Update: Check out David Armano’s recent thoughts on social becoming “to look less social.”
