Apparently I’m on to something.
About a week and a half ago, I killed off my old Twitter account and moved to a brand new one, thus losing all my old tweets along with all my followers. It wasn’t originally my intention to do so, but the more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea of starting over fresh.
Now comes a couple of reports that back up the idea that when it comes to social networking, smaller numbers are in fact better.
First, a professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford, Robin Dunbar, has concluded that regardless of how many Facebook friends we might have, we can only effectively manage about 150 friendships.
He found that people tended to self-organise in groups of around 150 because social cohesion begins to deteriorate as groups become larger. …
“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,” said Dunbar.
This explains why I also don’t tend to follow more than 170-180 people on Twitter. Inevitably, when I add more people than that, I always tend to drop a few others as the “noise” increases.
Clive Thompson of Wired seems to agree. He points out that in social networks, once a group grows too large, conversation and interaction stop. What starts out as a small one-to-one or one-to-few circle of connections becomes a large one-to-many broadcast, thus losing any sense of intimacy or connectedness. Thus, rather than strive for bigger and bigger numbers, he argues, we should be working to maintain smaller, more connected social circles. He concludes, “There’s value in obscurity.”
Fortunately, obscurity is one thing I’ve mastered.
Previously:
How to instantly lose all your Twitter followers
How to play the game of ‘Blog-Facebook-Twitter’
