{"id":107,"date":"2007-07-15T22:24:16","date_gmt":"2007-07-15T12:24:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/Liako.Biz\/2007\/07\/facebook-poll-how-many-friends-do-you-have\/"},"modified":"2007-07-15T22:24:16","modified_gmt":"2007-07-15T12:24:16","slug":"facebook-poll-how-many-friends-do-you-have","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/eliasbizannes.com\/blog\/2007\/07\/facebook-poll-how-many-friends-do-you-have\/","title":{"rendered":"Facebook poll: how many friends do you have?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>One of <a href=\"http:\/\/facebook.com\">Facebook<\/a>&#8216;s new features is the ability to create surveys, targeted to certain groups of people within the community site. One caught my eye today, which asked 1,000 random people &#8220;How many friends do you have?&#8221;. Although I am not sure of the conditions this poll was conducted under (ie, did only Australian&#8217;s see it?), 1,000 random people should theoretically be a fairly representative sample of the entire population.<\/p>\n<p>Whilst the results immediately show some interesting information on the typical size of a person&#8217;s network (which is a discussion in itself), I am equally fascinated by the specific genders and age breakdown of people who answered the poll and the correlation with their network size.  One theory I have of why people spend so much time on the site, is because people &#8216;collect&#8217; friends. They are constantly discovering old friends through mutual friends &#8211; a friend&#8217;s list leads a person to another profile where they may discover someone they have lost touch with. Check the results first, before I continue:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/liako\/816887781\/\" title=\"Photo Sharing\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/farm2.static.flickr.com\/1210\/816887781_203706a63c.jpg\" alt=\"Poll on \" height=\"161\" width=\"500\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/liako\/816887791\/\" title=\"Photo Sharing\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/farm2.static.flickr.com\/1160\/816887791_8723380f2e.jpg\" alt=\"Facebook poll breakdown\" height=\"399\" width=\"500\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/liako\/816887803\/\" title=\"Photo Sharing\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/farm2.static.flickr.com\/1423\/816887803_d169a9c385.jpg\" alt=\"Facebook poll breakdown by age\" height=\"315\" width=\"500\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><strong>Some of my interpretations of the results<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Despite being open to anyone since late last year, university students still dominate the site as over half the survey was answered by people in the 18-24 age bracket<\/li>\n<li>About 46% of males and 49% of females have over 200+ people. It&#8217;s impossible to have 200 &#8216;friends&#8217; &#8211; no one can physically see 200 friends on a regular basis This tells me Facebook is now more about &#8216;contacts&#8217; and keeping in touch with people you know. This makes it more than just a closed network of your close friends and more of a networking tool &#8211; validating what some commentators have been saying of late. I could spend a whole blog post explaining the implications of this, but basically, this means facebook is &#8216;the&#8217; social networking site now and it&#8217;s only going to get more entrenched due to the law of cumulative advantage.<\/li>\n<li>Of people aged 35 and above, 70% have under 99 friends &#8211; which is only the case of 41% of people aged 25-34, and 19% of 18-24. This is interesting, because the people in the 24+ age group didn&#8217;t have facebook when they were at university (which is why 18-24 is so dominant in this regard). Over time, you would expect the age groups to be fairly synchronised &#8211; in fact older people would have much larger networks. This tells me despite all the hype, Facebook is still not mainstream &#8211; there is a heck of a lot more growth to occur.<\/li>\n<li>&#8230;and leading off where I started the blog posting: the fact that more males answered the poll (53%) &#8211; despite women generally outnumbering men in Western countries &#8211; implies men are more interested in knowing how many friends people have. So if you tie that with my &#8216;friend collector&#8217; theory means more men spend time &#8216;collecting&#8217;&#8230;in other words, men stalk more!<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of Facebook&#8216;s new features is the ability to create surveys, targeted to certain groups of people within the community site. One caught my eye today, which asked 1,000 random people &#8220;How many friends do you have?&#8221;. Although I am not sure of the conditions this poll was conducted under (ie, did only Australian&#8217;s see [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[68,149,152,176,190,268,278,295,419,329,369],"class_list":["post-107","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-socialcomputing","tag-australia","tag-facebook","tag-flickr","tag-growth","tag-information","tag-people","tag-poll","tag-results","tag-socialcomputing","tag-social-networking","tag-trends","post-preview"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/eliasbizannes.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/eliasbizannes.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/eliasbizannes.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eliasbizannes.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eliasbizannes.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=107"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/eliasbizannes.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/eliasbizannes.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=107"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eliasbizannes.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=107"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eliasbizannes.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=107"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}