What's a Healthy Number of Friends on Facebook ?

Resist the urge to collect friends and followers on social networking sites. The average Facebook user has 130 "friends", usually a mixture of genuine mates, colleagues and old contacts you wouldn't recognize if you passed on the street, and according to Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary anthropologist at Oxford University, that's a pretty healthy number.

Back in 1992. Dunbar determined that the size of our brain put a cap on the number of meaningful social relationships we can realistically manage. The so-called Dunbar Number is 150.

"There's an inner layer of about five friends," he says."The next layer adds another 10, then there are more layers at 50 and 150. As you go further out, the amount of time you spend socialising with those people declines."

Dunbar says that social networking sites haven't changed the basic principles of theory. If you're hanging on to 700 people on Facebook, chances are you only communicate a lot with a core group. The immediacy of internet lets you keep tabs on far-flung contacts and prevent them from slipping into the outer layers of your contact book but. "the Interesting question is whether you invest so heavily in those old relationships online that new relationships with people you live with at the moment suffer."

Either way, it's worth clinging on to your friends one way or other. Research from Brigham Young University in Utah found that maintaining social bonds adds years to your life. So hold off on that Facebook cull for now.

via : T3