I consider myself fairly well connected. I talk to a lot of different people, in a lot of places about a lot of varied things. One thing I have always noticed about my networking though is just how bad I am at maintaining meaningful and useful relationships with large numbers of people.

In the last week I have finally hit 150 odd followers/following on Twitter, not a lot by some standards, but a significant number none the less. You see 150 (or thereabouts) is known as Dunbar’s Number.

In an article 1992 article, anthropologist Robin Dunbar predicted a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationship. He based the theory on a study of non-human primates but argued a “mean group size” of 148 (casually rounded to 150) was near the limit of humans.

So maybe this would explain why despite much pruning I have found that my follow list of around 150 on Twitter (there are a few bots in there granted) hasn’t really grown in the last couple of months.

In fact on Jaiku I topped out at 110-115 over 6 months ago and it hasn’t changed by more than a couple since.

My address book on the phone is always about 160 with regular pruning of obsolete contacts.

BUT does this mean I only know/communicate with about 150 or so people? There is overlap but the the number I would estimate is nearly 250-300 people spread across several services.

So how does this related back to Dunbar?

Well there is context at work here. I use different services for different jobs. Jaiku for me offers a very personal conversational medium, one in which I discuss topics, sometimes at length, with people some of whom I now consider to be “friends” even though I may never have met them in the real world. I suspect the more limited set of contacts is based on the more involved nature of the conversations.

Twitter is less conversational, more of a announce and respond time medium. Whilst there are a number of my Jaiku contact sitting on the blue channel also the majority of my 150 or so followings are people who I know in a more professional context. Twitter is used for asking and answering simple questions, sharing a brief thought or announcing an event. I find it far easier to maintain a larger number of relationships in this format.

Where to next?

I know people who just don’t believe in Dunbar’s number, to be fair though many of them are also follower junkies living in heady clouds of thousands of followers/followings. Do they know each and every one of them, of course not but it’s volume that matters to them.

(As a note my thinking on following addicts is that in volume they consciously/sub-sconsciously are seeking validation of their thinking, afterall they have thousands of people listening to their words and there’s wisdom in them there crowds isn’t there?)

I expect my following/followers will exceed this theoretical limit over the coming weeks, tools such as Tweetdeck will help me manage this rise in volume through partitioning and filtering.

My instinct tells me that whilst Dunbar’s number may well have worked in an offline connected world that the use of technologies (effectively creating artificial contexts I guess) will extend our useful reach way beyond 150.

I predict however that my ability to maintain the current level of personal interaction with each and every one will decrease. I will spread myself thinner and thinner in an effort to please everyone.

We will see.