John Vejnoska’s Blog

Often I’ll hear gossip among friends that they deleted a certain individual as their friend on Facebook, I rarely pay any attention to this clamor, however one particularly good friend recently told me about an axing he brought down on a mutual friend; I had to intervene.  My argument is simple, are you seriously too cool to be someone’s virtual friend?  If you don’t want to hear about them, make the appropriate setting change in your home feed, if you don’t want them to see you, change your privacy settings.  My friend rebutted that his friends on Facebook were spirally out of control consisting of “randoms” and people who generally do not belong in his core network.

It was this conversation that sparked my interest and investigation about how Facebook displays your social circle as well as capability of the human brain to handle a social network of friends that will grow infinitely, provided I stay true to my mantra: continuing to add new friends, never deleting the old.  At my current state of around 700 friends, it takes quite a bit of mental computation to remember - who of my friends are allies, who conflict, who wants to date whom, and so forth.  At what point will this weight of new friends crush my mental ability to understand my social graph, or even remember everyone in it?  Continue reading →