Last week’s Wall Street Journal ran a very interesting article discussing the research behind the size of our personal networks.

In summary, the article explained that in 1993, Oxford anthropologist, Robin Dunbar, published research explaining that humans have an approximate ceiling of 150 friends. The theory was derived by researching social groups in nonhuman primates and then adding to that number for humans, due in part because of our larger neocortex, the part of the brain used for conscious thought and language.

The article continues by saying online tools, such as Facebook and MySpace, may be increasing this number and allowing people to have even larger networks. They did note that most friendships start offline and close friendships are still “touchy-feely”.

Just for fun, I decided to compare my contacts in Outlook, Facebook, and LinkedIn to see how I stack up against the “average” human.

Outlook: 425 Contacts
Facebook: 254 Friends
LinkedIn: 60 Connections

I don’t consider myself a “super-user” of Facebook or LinkedIn, so I’m sure there are plenty of people out there with thousands of friends and connections. Actually, one of my contacts on LinkedIn has close to 10,000 people in his network. In my opinion, having that many friends is useless. You might as well save your time and randomly cold-call people in the White Pages when you need a contact.

How do you compare to the average human?

If you haven’t yet, make sure to add me to your Facebook and LinkedIn networks. You can lookup my profile using my email address, david [at] isserman.com.