title: “First the Dunbar Number, now The Bell Number” date: 2010-03-12 tags:
- “socialnetworking”
Unless you’ve had your head in books other than social media, the number of users within a network you can have a meaningful relationship with is 150. Out of that number that number then drops to between 2 and 8 close relationships. The key figure is 150, this is know as the Dunbar Number.I’ve got a new one, The Bell Number, which is the average number of social network sites a human can meaningfully manage. I think it’s four.Okay here’s the list:
- Yammer
- MySpace
- Identi.ca
- Orkut
- Google Buzz
- FriendFeed
- Friendster
- Bebo
- Ning (I’m with about six networks alone here).
- Friends Reunited
- Flickr
- Foursqaure
- Gowalla
Those are the ones I know off the top of my head. Some have fallen by the wayside, some I use still. But to have meaningful communication with the people on then I rely on the likes of Tweetdeck to manage the important ones. After that everything else gets shut off from my browser and looked at once in a blue moon.So in reality it’s:
- MySpace
The Bell Number (it’ll be in Wikipedia soon, just you watch :) ).