Oxford don: Facebook friends may not be quite so friendly

A professor of evolutionary anthropology at Oxford University, Robin Dunbar, has performed research saying that human beings are only capable of keeping 150 friends at a time, despite the many thousands of "friends" that some Facebook users have.

Dunbar told the Times Online that "the interesting thing is that you can have 1,500 friends but when you actually look at traffic on sites, you see people maintain the same inner circle of around 150 people that we observe in the real world".

The newspaper reports that Dunbar "derived the limit from studying social groupings in a variety of societies - from neolithic villages to modern office environments". Dunbar's research, he says, shows that human beings are limited to around 150 friends, which he defines as people that know each other and contact each other at least once a year.

Dunbar's research is, as yet, unpublished, but due to be made public later in 2010. News website Techwatch says that Dunbar's research showed that Facebook profiles with thousands of friends had the same amount of traffic as those with far less.