A just-released Pew study on the ways people use social networking sites has found, unsurprisingly, that the most popular social network is Facebook, with 92% of social networking users reporting that they have a Facebook account.
The study also found that on average Facebook users have about 229 Friends, with about 22% of their total Friends list being comprised of people they know from high school, 12% extended family, 10% coworkers, 9% college friends, 8% immediate family, 7% people from extracurricular groups and 2% being neighbors.
According to Pew, the average Facebook user has never met 7% of their Facebook “Friends” in real life, which means that on average about 16 people on a given Facebook Friends list are actually more like strangers. Users on average have only met 3% of their list (around 7 people) just once.
These numbers seem about right: A quick scroll down my Facebook Friends list reveals a smattering of people I’ve just added because I know “of” them and a few people I’ve added who I’ve met once at a conference. These not-quite friends Facebook Friends serve as reminders that Facebook should make it easier to mass “un-Friend.”
Either that or come up with a different word for the relationship.
Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 500 million users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original idea for the term...
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