Facebook and The Metrics Of Friends
From Inside Facebook as summarized from The Economist:
The average male Facebook user with 120 friends:
- Leaves comments on 7 friends' photos, status updates, or wall
- Messages or chats with 4 friends
The average female Facebook user with 120 friends:
- Leaves comments on 10 friends' photos, status updates, or wall
- Messages or chats with 6 friends
The average male Facebook user with 500 friends:
- Leaves comments on 17 friends' photos, status updates, or wall
- Messages or chats with 10 friends
The average female Facebook user with 500 friends:
- Leaves comments on 26 friends' photos, status updates, or wall
- Messages or chats with 16 friends
In other words, Facebook users comment on stuff from only about 5-10% of their Facebook friends. And as has been shown by many other studies, women communicate with more people in all cases than men.
This is the takeaway, and it’s very true:
His findings: while many people have hundreds friends on Facebook, they still only communicate with a small few. Or to quote the author of the article, "Humans may be advertising themselves more efficiently. But they still have the same small circles of intimacy as ever."