No no no no no. A thousand times no. First of all, the monkeysphere does not work this way. The old cracked article (linked elsewhere but also provided here[

No no no no no. A thousand times no. First of all, the monkeysphere does not work this way. The old cracked article (linked elsewhere but also provided here[1]) is sanctimonious overstatement. Not all friends are equal. We don't live in groups in the same way anymore. (Its most blatant stupidity is to claim that we have absolute no interest in strangers, but only slightly less grating is its ignorance of the 6-degree effects that keep us united as a species.) All the monkeysphere can _safely_ say is that there is a limit to the number of connections you have; from an I/O perspective this is obvious. But there's nothing special about the number 150 as it is an _average_. And TWITTER IS NOT REAL LIFE. Strictly speaking the damn article doesn't even get the terms right, you don't _have_ twitter friends, you follow people in order to build a stream of interesting things. Why am I so angry? WHY AM I SO--uh, sorry. I'm angry because this is the very worst of pop psych, the very worst of science writing. Someone took a sensible scientific concept--Dunbar's number--and starts applying it to everything in sight without regard to the scientific method. Then someone else writes about it. The valid science of the article, such as it is, is to show that online connections follow some similar patterns to offline connections, with variable levels of connectedness. Also, I've got a knee-jerk visceral reaction to that cracked article and knew I'd see it here. In fact it'd probably be fair to say I'm ranting more against it than against the submission. Oh well, I still think I have a point. --- oh yeah oops [1]http://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html http://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html