This past week the Economist published a piece entitled Primates On Facebook that described some research done by the Facebook Data Team. Since there have been a number of questions throughout the monkeysphere, we thought we would take the opportunity to describe our approach, the data, and our analysis.
We were asked a simple question: is Facebook increasing the size of people’s personal networks? This is a particularly difficult question to answer, so as a first attempt we looked into the types of relationships people do maintain, and the relative size of these groups. The image above presents a high-level overview of our findings: while the average Facebook user communicates with a small subset of their entire friend network, they maintain relationships with a group two times the size of this core. This not only affects each user, but also has systemic effects that may explain why things spread so quickly on Facebook.
Before discussing the data, let us first set the context.
People you know
Many people are asking questions about the number of friends they have on Facebook. Do I have enough? Do I have too many? What may be tripping people up here is the language: while the people you’re connected to on Facebook are called your “friends,†they’re more likely people you have met at some point in your life. Social network researchers have been trying to measure this number for decades, and come across a number of clever techniques.
If you’ve read the Tipping Point, you may remember a study Gladwell described where people were asked to identify whether or not they knew people with names from a long list culled from a phone book. Based on the probability of knowing someone with a given name and the number of people with this name that a person knows, we can estimate the number of people a given subject has met. Killworth, et al. found using this technique and others that the number of people a person will know in their lifetime ranges somewhere between 300 and 3000 ((Killworth, P., Johnsen, E., Russell, H. B., Shelley, G. A., and McCarty, C. Estimating the size of personal networks. Social Networks 12 (1990), 289–312.)).
On Facebook, the average number of friends that a person has is currently 120 ((Facebook Statistics)). Given that Facebook has only been around for 5 years, that not everyone uses it, and that the not every acquaintance has found each other, this number seems reasonable for an average user.
Communication network
As a subset of the people you know, there are some individuals with whom you communicate on an ongoing basis. The number of individuals that represent a person’s core support network has been found to be much, much smaller than their entire network. Peter Marsden found the number of people with whom individuals “can discuss important matters” numbers only 3 for Americans ((Marsden, P. Core discussion networks of americans. American Sociological Review 52, 1 (1987), 122–131.)). In a subsequent survey, researchers found that this number has dropped slightly over the past 10 years ((Mcpherson, Miller, Smith-Lovin, Lynn, Brashears, and Matthew, E. Social isolation in america: Changes in core discussion networks over two decades. American Sociological Review 71, 3 (June 2006), 353–375.)), causing some alarm in the press, but without sufficient explanation ((While this work is well cited, there is support that the methodology underestimates the core network, e.g. Bearman, P., and Parigi, P. Cloning Headless Frogs and Other Important Matters: Conversation Topics and Network Structure. Social Forces 83 (2004), 535.)).
How many people an individual communicates with probably exists somewhere between their total network size and their support network. Some research by Gueorgi Kossinets and Duncan Watts observing all email communication at a university shows that the number of ongoing contacts hovers somewhere between 10 and 20 over a 30 day period ((Kossinets, G., and Watts, D. J. Empirical analysis of an evolving social network. Science 311, 5757 (January 2006), 88–90.)).
Maintained Relationships
Facebook and other social media allow for a type of communication that is somewhat less taxing than direct communication. Technologies like News Feed and RSS readers allow people to consume content from their friends and stay in touch with the content that is being shared. This consumption is still a form of relationship management as it feeds back into other forms of communication in the future. For instance, a high school friend uploads a photo of her new puppy and this photo appears in your News Feed. You click on the photo, browse through a host of other photos and discover that she has also gotten engaged, which may lead you to reach out to her.
This type of communication is the core of the Facebook experience, and given the question posed by the Economist, we wondered what effect this sort of relationship maintenance had on the breadth of people’s networks.
Measuring Networks on Facebook
To try and answer questions about network size on Facebook, we looked at the communications of a random sample of users over the course of 30 days. We defined networks in 4 different ways:
- All Friends: the largest representation of a person’s network is the set of all people they have verified as friends.
- Reciprocal Communication: as a measure of a sort of core network, we counted the number of people with whom a person had had reciprocal communications, or an active exchange of information between two parties.
- One-way Communication: the total set of people with whom a person has communicated.
- Maintained Relationships: to measure engagement, we took the set of people for whom a user had clicked on a News Feed story or visited their profile more than twice.
For each users we calculated the size of their reciprocal network, one-way network and network of maintained relationships, and plotted this as a function of the number of friends a user has. As Andreas mentions in his blog post about the article, the visualization (shown below) did not make it into the article, but presents a pretty clear picture of the relationship between these types of communication.
In the diagram, the red line shows the number of reciprocal relationships, the green line shows the one-way relationships, and the blue line shows the passive relationships as a function of your network size. This graph shows the same data as the first graph, only combined for both genders. What it shows is that, as a function of the people a Facebook user actively communicate with, you are passively engaging with between 2 and 2.5 times more people in their network. I’m sure many people have had this feeling, but these data make this effect more transparent.
Systemic Effects
What effect does a 2x increase in connectivity mean for a network? The easiest way to observe this is to look at one person’s personal network. The image below shows the personal network for one of my coworkers. The first diagram shows his entire network, namely all of his friends, and all of the relationships between his friends. It is clear that the cluster on the top is the highly connected set of Facebook coworkers, and the cluster on the right is another group of friends.
The cell on the bottom right shows only those relationships that have reciprocal communication. Many of the individuals in his network are completely disconnected or out of touch with each other. Moving to the bottom left cell, we see the slightly more connected network containing one-way communication. This includes every person who wrote a comment, sent a message or wrote a wall post to one of my coworker’s other friends. The cell on the top-right shows the passive network, including all those people who were keeping up with their friends. While some of his friends are still disconnected, a very large percentage are now reachable through some set of observations.
The stark contrast between reciprocal and passive networks shows the effect of technologies such as News Feed. If these people were required to talk on the phone to each other, we might see something like the reciprocal network, where everyone is connected to a small number of individuals. Moving to an environment where everyone is passively engaged with each other, some event, such as a new baby or engagement can propagate very quickly through this highly connected network.
While these data are not a controlled experiment, and do not directly relate to the theories described above, they do show a directional trend in the way people manage relationships on a social network today. We hope to continue this line of research with the eventual hope of making relationships that much easier to manage.
This post represents the work of data scientists Lee Byron, Tom Lento, Cameron Marlow, Itamar Rosenn. Special thanks to Alex Smith for letting us use him as an example. For more insights like this, make sure to become a fan of the Facebook Data Team.
overstated 
This post best read with the Facebook Data Team theme song on repeat: http://tr.im/hbaA
you should have linked to this monkeysphere instead, cam.
Thank you for adventuring into the monkeysphere and returning with such insightful and useful information.
Regarding the gender effects, I wonder if you have heard/seen the recent article in Psychological Science (an influential journal of experimental psychology) on how females are less tolerant of same-sex peers than men?
Basically, they found that despite the mountains of evidence that women are more sociable etc, they are less tolerant of flaws in their same sex peers. They found that college women change their roommates more, report less satisfaction with their roommates, and they did a laboratory study confirming this in a more controlled setting. I would be happy to send you a copy if you like (it is not my article, but it struck me as an easy question to ask Facebook to see how well it corresponded to real life).
You write, “The second cell shows only those relationships that have reciprocal communication. Many of the individuals in his network are completely disconnected or out of touch with each other.” but I wonder if that’s a fair conclusion. From my own experience, I have some groups of friends that communicate over facebook and others that communicate over chat or email or whatever, even though they all have profiles on facebook. Do you account for alternative communication streams before making judgments about the structure of friend groups?
With the way technology has advanced, our methods of communications have allowed us to have different means of maintaining relationships. We now keep in touch with those people near and far through social media sites such as Facebook. I found this information very interesting.
@Cedar, there is quite a bit of social network research that supports this theory as well. Elizabeth Bott’s canonical work on the topic discusses the role women play as communicators in marriages (the study was done in the 50s).
@Steve, I completely agree with your sentiment. This is explicitly why we didn’t say anything about the overall effect of Facebook on people’s social lives. Your example compliments work done by Caroline Haythornthwaite which suggests stronger ties have a higher multiplexity (number of channels of communication). Facebook obviously can’t capture all of them, but our goal here was to compare the relative sizes of people you do engage with.
hi wats up yall
I’m just wondering if each of the networks studied was mutually exclusie or not? If someone sent a one-way message to a friend one day with no response and then a week later sends a message on a different subject and the same friend responds, were you counting it as both one way and reciprocal or does one network trump another e.g., once two-way communication is identified, then you don’t count it as one-way. Or were you double counting friends if they had multiple networks?
The comments about gender on here seem to be a bit biologically deterministic – gender is a social construction….
Under the profile where you enter the High School you attended it will not let me enter Headland High School, East Point, GA, Instead it only gives the choice of Headland High somewhere in AL.
Very interesting especially for a data fanatic like me.
For the longest of time, I’ve been wondering if facebook internally know the profiles I visit most frequently and indeed they do. Although you intuitively know who you visit most often, it would be nice to know the actual raw data.
I’m a little on the fence though when it comes to letting users know who visits them most often. I would like to know but not sure if I want others to know. Self-fish I know, but I don’t want to come off as some kind of stalker or something.
The link “visualization” is to https://overstated.net/2009/03/09/median-network.png
But the resource is missing.
Great article!!!!
Hi,
I would love to maintain my long list of friends and business aquaintances on Facebook. Suddenly today comments I was making about problems on Facebook were censored and my account was suspended. The comments were mild and asking why certain things were happening to the Facebook friends that I have. You may want to contact people like myself that are marketing and internet consultants that recommend products like yours to my clients for marketing. Their are many opportunities to help people and become the hero, if you explain and talk about the problems and solutions being worked on rather then censor people. In a world where one can send out a message and it is quickly heard around the world you might want to enlist peoples help.
I have a list of many problems that have occured in the last week since your “change over”. I would be happy to share them with your corporate offices.
Regards,
Alicia Roberts
Alicia Roberts and Associates
arob18214@yahoo.com
Hi,
My name is Kate Bazilevsky. I am an official “Totems” Laboratory Rep. The Lab studies the Catalog of Human Population (“Shan Hai Jingâ€), which is now open and can be used in ALL areas of human activity. The Catalog contains full descriptions of all people (based on DOB). People born on the same day (depending on leap or common year) have the same “program” and therefore are MOST compatible. Therefore, learning about yourself and communicating with people that are like yourself – solves ALL relationships and any other problems.
If this interests you, more information can be found by searching for “Catalog of Human Population” on Google.
All the best!
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Facebook has the power to alter relationships. It just depends how far you allow this to go!
I think that Steve (way back) made a good point that a lot of the interaction may be occuring offline or via other online media. I know that my childhood bestfriend and I e-mail each other several times a day, rather than use facebook or other social networks to keep in touch. And for friends that are local generally I use the phone unelss its a “happy birthday” message. So for “local” contacts I do read status updates but I am way more likely to respond in reality because its more convenient for me to do so.
I find the one way communication thing kind of odd. Everyone I talk to on there is fairly mutual. I have 320 friends of which I know in real life roughly 50% or 160 people. I can say that Facebook doesn’t expand my social circle although meetup did in the poker world and a local outdoors group did I found online. What Facebook is useful for I find is bringing you together with friends who you weren’t as close to. It has tightened my friendship circles back together. It also gives me tons of things to do to get out of my house like concerts or friends wanting to hang out. Overall it has been a good tool for being social in real life for me.
Oh the one thing I forgot to close with is it is nice to see the internet getting me out of the house instead of World of Warcraft which causes people to be hermits.
this is so freaking mind melding i can’t take it.
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Hi Kaytee, Just like you, I use my Facebook to keep connected with my childhood best friends and I happy to see their updates.
Cam-
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I suspect my colleague Matt Pritchett might be with me on this. One of his cartoons this past week showed a father next to a television tuned to the World Cup, explaining to his children that “at some point in the next few weeks, you are going to see me cry”. And the day after the last survivor of the Great Escape died,
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Dear Mr Cameron,
My name is Yenny, i am a master of electronic commerce. i am interesting in your research about maintained relationships on facebook.
i have some question that what variable question did you use to make the classification in 3 class like maintained relationship, one-way communication and mutual communication. and what is the reason did you use the sample only 500 friend in this research?
i really need your help for do the thesis.
Thank you.
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This page appears to get a good ammount of visitors. How do you get traffic to it? It offers a nice unique spin on things. I guess having something authentic or substantial to say is the most important thing.
Thanks Cameron – great analysis.
Wondering what happens when you look at the two way communciation relationships vs gepgraphical distance between people and age. For example, for 14-18 yr olds, do they communciate primarily to people near them/in the same school as them or are they using facebook as a way to stay in touch with people they don’t normally see? How does that change in 19-21 year olds? 22-29?
In other words, is Facebook a supplement to ordinary social contact, a way to stay in touch over distances, or a bit of everything?
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There is a interesting discussion in Dipqa about Facebook and its evils check this out
http://dipqa.com/view/dips/27/where-facebook-heading-to-am-seeing-people-becoming/
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Great stuff, guys.
Now that the average Facebook user has 235 friends (nearly double what it was when you published this study!) any updates on this research?
I’d love to know what percentage of our Facebook networks we access with any type of regularity (maintained relationships, mutual communication, and one-way communication). Thanks.