It probably comes to no surprise to most people that
a recent study published at the British Association Festival of Science 2007 concludes that people who have many "friends" on a social networking site do not necessarily have any more friends in real life than the average person.
The study concludes that factors outside of the social networking world limit the number of close friends that a person is able to keep to roughly five. It turns out that we're probably hard wired to only be able to keep a limited number of people in our inner circle because of cognitive limits. Although the social networking tools don't seem to affect the number of close relationships that a person has, they do seem to allow people to extend the number of second-tier friends that they have.
After having restated all of the meaty points of the study, it might be a good time to say that one study does not make the truth and our understanding of how social networks affect us in the real world is so young that you can say that it's still in the womb. Undoubtedly, there are "friend-whore" haters out there who are dancing on their chairs upon hearing news of this study, but the study only says that social networks don't allow you to artificially expand the number of your closest relationships. It could very well be that some people could have fewer close and second tier friendships if it weren't for social networking tools. The opposite could be true too. All the time spent keeping up with ten thousand online friends may leave a person unable to maintain as many real relationships as he or she would otherwise have. At the risk of sounding obvious, I'll say that both scenarios are probably true depending on the person and the environment.
I would count myself among the people who get annoyed by "friend-whores." It bugs me so much that I intentionally didn't add in friends list type of features to my site, Social Wave. It's not that I envy these people or find them petty, opportunistic, or fake. I just don't like flaky people and people who have a ridiculous number of online friends just strike me as people that wouldn't be able to depend on. Being aware of this personal bias of mine, I wonder how the number of friends that a person has online can affect their real life perception to other people.
Whenever I gather together with other people who are knowledgeable in online communities and social networks, I frequently hear heavy skepticism of online measures of a person's social relevance or reputation. I repeatedly hear the belief that the most influential people in real life are often off the map online. This is hardly a new phenomenon. It takes a lot more than a secret handshake to exchange a few words with the President of the United States or even just J.D. Salinger.
Sometimes you do run into online profiles for industry giants. Would the number of friends or specific representation of that person's online friends affect how you would perceive this person in real life? If you were to meet with a presidential candidate, how would your perception of this person be affected if you saw his or her profile page with only 5 friends vs. 50,000 friends? Probably, you'd rationalize that you'd be disappointed if this person only had 5 friends because in this scenario, you expect a presidential candidate to have a lot of supporters or friends.
Let's take this down to a more muddy scenario. Suppose we're now talking about a doctor that you're going to see for the first time tomorrow. Are you going to be more critical of this doctor's advice if he/she had 0 friends, 5 friends, or 500+ friends? In what cases do we see it as a positive for people to have 500+ connections and in what cases do we see it as evidence of folly?
