social MEDIA relationships have no limit :) - Luigi Centenaro

Nice idea. Though when you hit the limit, you would end up having to chose who to kick from your list. Unless that kicking were automated. Which brings us back to the original problem that defining such relationships in the first place often adds more worry than an auto-triggered-by-your-everyday-actions kind of approach (which does have its own world of problems, admittedly...). - Philipp Lenssen

Did they meet Scoble? - Steve Rubel

Tag+Rate>set strike out limit/Filter/reduce/visible tags+but hopefully soon lists fold/collapse>file view../ Tag/Rinse repeat. This will come in handy also for Stephen Colbert when he joins his Thetruthiness room;-D, and I bet for you too Paul/FF Co, for the wood for the trees it may need a nice hot air balloon/or summat like a hand held mini helicopter which runs on its own propulsion! filter etc, Anyways a bit of Friendfood for the road, speaking of which its tummytime!:-P - Jason

The number of relationships one can maintain is clearly limited but the number of information sources one can process is far greater. I suspect most of the Twitter/FF/other social media friends are much more like RSS feeds than relationships. - timepilot

I seem to remember reading some research that theorised that the maximum size community/relationship we can maintain is limited at around 200 people. I'm trying to find where I read it now... *edit*: hah-nevermind, clicking on your link showed me exactly the research i was citing. - David Adam

Social media apps need multiple friend "TYPES", i.e. family, real-life friends, colleagues, online friends / acquaintances, and business contacts. This way you could have multiple groups of friends. I can dream... oh, wait Facebook already has this - they have groups with permission controls - and yes I really use that set of features!! I love that! - Susan Beebe

Dunbar's number is usually taken to be the maximal size of a cohesive group, not the maximal number of relationships one person can maintain. Some sources (including the Wikipedia article) confuse the two. It's an interesting question how the social sites would change with a friend limit. A room size limit on FriendFeed would also be an interesting experiment. - Michael Nielsen

Limiting Twitter friend count to 140 would drive slackers to other micro-blogging platforms. ;-) No really, we have (an growing number of) tools to filter relevant content from much greater number of users. - Nenad Nikolic from twhirl

Let us also not lose sight of the fact that, all other things being equal, the human organism is an engine of adaptation. I don't have a background in neurobiology or in developmental psychology, to say nothing of anthropology, but it's hardly dizzying leap to imagine that the emergence and subsequent evolution of the human mind was (and is) an exercise in testing and overreaching boundaries...[to be continued] - Derrick Burns

[continued]...which is to say: humbug. The internet with its shiny social media toys is nothing more or less than a novel environment, with its attendant resource distributions, evolutionary pressures, and selection mechanisms. What I think we'll find is that those pressures and mechanisms will affect us not only intellectually, but, over time, physiologically as well. Have 140 friends, or 1400. Whether for the better there's no way to say, but we will adapt. It's what we're best at. - Derrick Burns

150 relationships to maintain, sure: but isn't the old mantra of if you aren't building your network, you're doing it wrong also true? You may only really interact on a regular basis with 150 people, but if you only choose to subscribe to or friend 150 people, you'll never find out about new people or new ideas. Maybe subscriber 151 and higher are people trying out for slots 1 through 150: oh dear, did MySpace have it right with their top friends list? - Mark Trapp

I wonder how much that limit may be changing, though. It seems like we interact with more and more people all the time. - Christopher Granade

If you assume that the sole purpose of Twitter ought to be to the maintenance of social relationships then this might make sense. If on the other hand you look at Twitter as partially being about maintaining social relationships but also partially about getting fast breaking news early, meeting new friends, forming new social relationships, being informed about interesting subjects by fringe connections, broadcasting your own social media, etc. then the 140 limit becomes a significant barrier to use. - Thomas Hawk

depends on the degree of reciprocity. I can be a follower to many (with the right tools), maintain a sense of their identities (sometimes aided by good UI), and have only rare interactions with them that, while ephemeral, can be rich, useful, and/or meaningful. I think the new forms of asymmetric friending/following and the tools for interfacing among these folks change the rules. What is a "social relationship" in 2008? What is the cognitive overhead to "maintain" it? - tonx

LiveJournal did this for a while. People just got multiple journals and X-posted between them. An online friend isn't always the same thing as a real friend. - Jonathan Tang

What is better needed is an actual way to filter the significance of a large pool of social relationships from strangers to closest friend. The answer here is relatively simple and straightforward. Allow users to use a 10 point rating system for every contact with 5 being a default. By incorporating this rating data into future systems of rank, relevancy and eventually search it would be more powerful than anything that exists in social media today. - Thomas Hawk

There was an argument a while back that Free Twitter should be limited to say 150 followed, more should be paid for as that is increasingly the realm of pro-sumerdom. That would also allow us to discover the marginal value of online friendship. - Broadstuff

I don't think we have much in common with the villages, tribes, and other organizations that Dunbar was studying. All of the groups he studied had a common interest in cohesion as a unit as a means for survival. I'm not convinced that many of us view our social network interactions as "necessary" (at least, I don't see it that way). - Jason Wehmhoener

Dunbar's number is the reason I prefer to work for companies with fewer than 150 people. - Ginger Makela Riker

If you can and want to keep up with 150 people then you will. Some of them will fade in and out of your social circle, effectively giving you many times that number if needed, but only around 150 at a time. (In your head that is.) - xero

The Dunbar number was arrived at by studying primates picking fleas off each other, not tribal humans ;) - Broadstuff

=Derrick, =timepilot. Also, note that even though we know about Dunbar's number, no one imposes an actual limit of 140 real-life friends. - j1m

I'm not sure that the people I have on my FriendFeed are what I would term "friends" or even "associates." They are contacts whose opinions I value, but if I don't hear from them in a while, it's not like I go out of my way to get back in touch. Same with some twitter folks...?? - Justin Long

agree with susan beebe. need to be able to group and prioritize friends. tweetdeck is starting to get at this - rob zand

The issue largely is that fringe contacts and even strangers produce valuable information even if infrequently. But by subscribing to large numbers in order to best get the chance of getting this information you also have to manage noise. Hide helps here. But fundamentally there are top contacts that are more important to you than strangers. By allowing users to rate these contacts as 10s and strangers as 1s you get the best of both under a new category of daily information based on personal relevancy. - Thomas Hawk

As Seth Godin always says it's not how many but who that's important - Jeremy Campbell from twhirl

We deliberately made the UI limiting within 30Boxes so that you would only try to keep up with 2-10 people (ostensibly those that matter most and impact your scheduling and decision making)... - Narendra

Thomas, I agree with your thinking completely. But in theory I can stay under the Dunbar's number here on FriendFeed (I am currently, and I hope to keep it that way) and still get the best of all worlds and the most valuable info so long as a few of the people I am subscribing to uber aggregate like you and Scoble. - Robert Seidman

Robert, even subscribing to the uber aggregaters though you miss a lot. Do a search for a term that you're interested in more broadly on FF and you'll find people you aren't subscribed to that are sharing interesting content that the uber aggregaters might miss. A system that allowed you to rate your higher priority contacts while still including the occasional quality content producer could produce the pinnacle of personal relevancy. - Thomas Hawk

Why does everyone try to define social software by just "friends?" That really sucks. People online are NOT my "friends." They are people I want in my social network. I have more than 8,000 business cards. Are you going to tell me that I haven't met 8,000 people and that I don't need to find a way to keep 8,000 in my rolodex? I would NEVER use such a software. Facebook limits me to 5,000 which makes it far less useful for business purposes than if it didn't have those limits. That said, I'm sure... - Robert Scoble

...that there is a market for such a limiting service. It might even be very popular. But then lots of stupid things are popular on the Internet. - Robert Scoble

140 chars limit instead of duct tape on Scoble's mouth ;) - A.T.

This assumes a lot. Like that Twitter can count. - XDpaul

Paul this limit was invented by the famous 150 number in a time when society worked completly different. This is like saying "because a hundred years ago a person would read 10 books in their lifetime and could not grasp more, how about we limit it to the same number today?". People just need to learn what works for them, how _they_ are comfortable using these systems and then apply it. - Nicole Simon

Thomas,Even at 140 people I had to utilize a lot of the hide always functionality to make things manageable, and that was with a lot of time to screw around with it. Using "search everyone" to follow topics of interests works very well for me as is, and they could retool the "Best Of" some to surface the best stuff across wider areas. There are perhaps a lot of ways to achieve being the pinnacle of personal relevancy but none of them are easy :-) Still, I'd love to see it achieved. - Robert Seidman

Twitter's 140-character limit wasn't arbitrary, it worked well with SMS making it useful on the go. Is there some specific thing that having only 10 friends would help you with? - ⓞnor

Here's the problem with "best of" today. Everyone's "best of" ought to be influenced by personal relationships. If my wife posts something with 3 comments and 3 likes this is more personally relevant to me than a thread about what music people are listening to with 30 comments and 30 likes. By weighting my higher value contacts you ensure that my wife's post is seen in my personal "best of" daily stream even if it pushes out the overall higher ranked thread on music. - Thomas Hawk

perhaps a better system would be 10 friends and 100 people you know then unlimited follow relationships. You could even automate the promotion of people from follow to know. Then weight the best of pages with this info. - John Cooper from fftogo

Dunbar's 150 limit theory is a group theory, not and individual theory. A group is pretty united at that number, but if it passes the 150 limit "people start becoming strangers to each other". But an individual can handle way more interactions. I mean, it all depends on how you view "friendship". If you believe that intimacy is a must to consider people friends, than your # will be low. - Jay Cruz

I think that would be an interesting experiment. And I'm sure it would have avoided some of the scale issues they hit. - Dave Winer

Jason realized that his limit was 750 .. (but why email?) - Vishwajith

aren't all relationships social? - Jeremy Toeman

It is surprising that there's not more implementation of XFN across social web apps; as imperfect as it is, it certainly adds much-needed value to the "friend" paradigm. - mabisa

Implementation of XFN or FOAF? "That's the wonderful thing about standards-- there's so many to choose from!" Of course, with so many services implementing APIs nowadays, it's not unreasonable that someone could use Google AppEngine or similar to create XFN from pre-existing services. Such tools may spur more services to start directly implementing XFN. - Christopher Granade

that's a really cool idea...maybe I'll stop at 140 on identica and see what happens! - Sarah Perez

a limit on number of relationships has merit. hard to say what value of N should be. I am positive that tens of thousands is the WRONG answer. people with very high numbers use Twitter et.al as a publishing platform. - ron k jeffries

If you want to pass from theory to practice, let me recommend you the book "Knowledge Management Strategies: A Handbook of Applied Technologies", which has a chapter called "Implementing Communities of Practice to Manage Knowledge and Drive Innovation"... I also have here a paper called "Distributed Consolidation: Identity, Reputation, and the Prospects for Online Social Interaction", written this year, but I didn't read it yet. - Marcos Marado

Thomas, on filtering: why not be able to dynamically identify score by staring individual posts, like slashdot and plurk do - if I star a post, I give you a certain number of points; if I star a comment on a post, I give you a certain (but possibly lesser) number of points; and be able to give perhaps multiple stars to indicate significance; two kinds of negative stars: "don't show me this" or "block user" so the system can learn. Then people can aggregate points over time, too... - Justin Long

I would like some kind of Top Friends or Best Friends layer in both FriendFeed and Twitter. It can be anon or fully socialized. - Elliott Ng

I like the idea of limited friends. What if you start with a fixed number, lets say 25, and once certain criteria are fulfilled (activity, no. of posts, etc.) you are allowed more... - Bastian

I've just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell's "The Tipping Point". Very interesting and inspiring. - Niv