"Facebook will increase your network, but not your friends"

Did this report really need writing?

Social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace do not help you make more genuine close friends, according to a survey by researchers who studied how the websites are changing the nature of friendship networks.
Although social networking on the internet helps people to collect hundreds or even thousands of acquaintances, the researchers believe that face to face contact is nearly always necessary to form truly close friendships.

Apparently all of those people who are in my list of friend on Facebook might not actually be real friends. Is anyone in IT naive enough to believe that anything that is displayed on a two dimensional screen can come anywhere close to replacing a real person to person interaction.

Previous research has suggested that a person’s conventional friendship group consists of around 150 people, with five very close friends but larger numbers of people who we keep in touch with less regularly. This figure is so consistent that scientists have suggested it is determined by the cognitive constraints of keeping up with large numbers of people. Larger numbers just require too much brain effort to keep track of.

But Dr Reader and his team have found that social networking sites do allow people to stretch this figure. The team asked over 200 people to fill in questionnaires about their online networking, asking for example how many online friends they had, how many of these were close friends and how many they had met face to face.

Five close friends that’s it – it’s not going to be changed by IT any time soon. As a task oriented person I’m not sure how people maintain a network of 150 let alone 200. As I have a people oriented wife I know it can be done, actually 200 seems a bit light .

via Wikinomics