How to make online friends and alienate people

Image via CrunchBase

As has been reported widely around the world in the last few days, apparently, the maximum number of friends that our brain can cope with is somewhere around 150. Which is interesting, but actually we already knew this. In fact, the BBC mentioned it last year:

If a wide circle of friends is taken as a popularity indicator, does that mean the more you have the more successful and happy you are? Or can you have too many? What is the best number?
The average number is about 150, says leading anthropologist Robin Dunbar. – “What’s the ideal number of friends?” – BBC, March, 2009

The reason it’s a hot topic now? Turns out the number holds true even when applied to Facebook, a realm of people’s lives where their number of friends is prominently displayed to uh, their friends.

“The interesting thing,” Dunbar told the Sunday Times, “is that you can have 1,500 friends but when you actually look at traffic on sites, you see people maintain the same inner circle of around 150 people.” – “Forget Facebook limits, brains can only manage 150 friends,” – Wired

Which is all very well and good for those of us with 150 or more friends – we are in the lucky group that, if necessary can cull the herd from time to time, eliminating those “friends” who bore us, or who we don’t really know all that well. Or, as Burger King showed last year, those “friends” who are worth about as much to us as a tenth of a hamburger.

But what if you don’t have 150 friends? Obviously, there’s room for more. The trick is, getting them.

One option is simply to promote yourself. Get out there into the online world. As a helpful eHow article suggests, “Join groups to connect with others who are interested in the same things. Add people from the group to your friends list to easily keep in contact.” But it also warns, “Avoid adding people just to raise your number of friends. If you don’t have the intention of communicating when them, they may just end up deleting you anyway.” Because, as we all know, being deleted by someone is certainly the worst that can come of trying to ‘friend’ someone you don’t know.

Maybe you should use your current friends to your advantage. As Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell describe in their book, The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the age of entitlement,

Almost everyone with a MySpace or Facebook page can tell you exactly how many friends he or she has. If it’s fewer than 50, you must be lame… Friending is inherently competitive, as each user has to decide whom to put in their “Top 8″… J.D., 24, told [Candice] Kelsey [author of Generation MySpace] that two spots in his Top 8 will always be reserved for “the two most attractive female photos from my list of friends.”

Granted, the ‘Top 8′ function is more applicable to MySpace than Facebook, but even on the latter you could make sure to only allow tags of yourself in photos with beautiful people. If there aren’t any of those, de-tag yourself from every photo and arrange to meet only the attractive people you’ve found during your random search.

If none of that works, there’s always option three: buying online friends. uSocial’s CEO Leon Hill seems to think it can work.

From Wired:

“The simple fact is that with a large following on Facebook, you have an instant and targeted group of people you can contact and promote whatever it is you want to promote,” [Hill] added. “The only problem is that it can be extremely difficult to achieve such a following, which is where we come in.”

The company offers packages for Facebook, the world’s number one social networking site, that start at 1,000 friends up to 10,000 friends at costs ranging from $177 to $1,167.

Or you could just make friends the way most other people do: at school or work, or by joining a sports team or WoW guild. Y’know, the old-fashioned way.