LinkedIn has “connections,” Twitter has “followers”, but Facebook famously co-opted the word “friend” and created a new verb.
What would be an impressive number of friends in real life?
British anthropologist and Oxford professor Robin Dunbar has posed a theory that the number of individuals with whom a stable interpersonal relationship can be maintained (read: friends) is limited by the size of the human brain, specifically the neocortex. “Dunbar’s number,” as this hypothesis has become known, is 150.
Facebook says 5,000.
