Fun With Facebook Numbers

Every so often, when I get bored, I like to analyze random things.  People who know me well know that I love data, and I especially love mining "hidden" data that perhaps exists somewhere south of where most people look.  For instance, this evening I ran a frequency analysis where each of my Facebook friends were a data point.

Behold the following chart:

Figure 1. Arbitrary grouping of Facebook friends, based on when/where we met.

My egomaniacal tendencies aside (I love turning people into data points, simply because it's so deliciously dehumanizing), there are some "interesting takeaways" (as us corporate types like to say) in the above chart.  For instance:

• Facebook's help page states that the average number of connections is 120.  (NOTE: Some of you will ask whether the 'average' is the mean or the median.  I have no idea, but I agree that it's a good argument to have.)  I have some Facebook friends who have under 50 connections; my younger sister currently has 1,658 (which I think is the most of any of my current Facebook friends, though I could be incorrect).  At present, I have 146 connections.  I started this Facebook account in 2007, so - on average, and not counting the people who've deleted me (or whom I've deleted) since then - I've added a net of about thirty Facebook friends per year.  I went into this analysis thinking that I had relatively few Facebook friends; I don't have a huge real-world network of acquaintances, and I'm also relatively stingy about who I choose to connect with via Facebook.  This is a ballpark estimate, but I only confirm about half of the friend requests that I receive (I also almost never send them to other people, which is due to my own approach-avoidance issues and doesn't help pad my stats).  That being said, I'm more pleased now than I was before I crunched these numbers at the girth of my social network.
• Life experiences build your social network.  Had I not gone to graduate school, I would have thirty fewer Facebook friends than I do at the present time.  Had I never attended college at Rutgers, you can cut another 32 friends from the total.  (Actually, even more than that, because it's unlikely that my wife would have married me had I never graduated from college.)  My point here is that, if you operate (as I do) under the assumption that bigger social networks belong to people who are generally more friendly and fun to be around, it makes sense to educate yourself and also to have several different series of life experiences under your belt.
• In my case, at least, a committed relationship also builds my social network.  Some may disagree with that point, and for all I know, my situation is different from what typically happens to people.  There's certainly anecdotal evidence that a previously highly social person will "settle down" into a committed relationship and soon thereafter lose a bunch of acquaintances.  In my case, though, my wife's introduced me to 35 people who've become my Facebook friends, people whom I likely wouldn't have otherwise met.  I think this is because she is far more sociable than I am, and she also has worked for a large company for the past nine years, so she knows a ton of people.  I've been able to get to know some of them, as well.
• I'm (probably) getting better at connecting with people.  I went to graduate school for only two years, but have almost as many Facebook connections through grad school than college (where I spent four years).  This has something to do with a recency effect, but I still think it's worth noting that most of my Facebook connections were built with people whom I did not even know when I started the account five years ago.
• I do an (intentionally) horrible job of being Facebook friends with members of my family.  This is related to something I mentioned above; I'm very stingy about who I confirm.  It actually pains me to have to hide someone from my News Feed, but when someone is that annoying, I know I have to hide them.  With many members of my family, I'm sure I'd have to hide them immediately after becoming their Facebook friend.

There are probably applications that analyze this data for you (they will also definitely hack your Facebook password, spam your profile and your friends' News Feeds, gain access to and sell all of your personal information, and probably give you Hepatitis C as well).  I chose to sit down for ten minutes and run down my Friends list, trying to create logical groups.  Some people were more difficult to put into a group than others (e.g., my sister's former boyfriend, whom I put in "Family" just because that's how I knew him in the first place).  But for the most part, I'm confident in the chart above.

It's interesting to take the time and figure out what your social network consists of - even if you keep Facebook, or Google+, or something else entirely running in the background for a few hours a day at work, it's still an essential part of your life, in my opinion.  If this kind of stuff interests you, perhaps give it a shot with your friends list, and see what you find out.