Here’s a Venn diagram displaying the overlap of my Facebook friends, my Twitter friends, and the percentages of each that I’ve met in person:

After a bit more work, I put together this rather difficult to decipher chart that shows overlap between all of the various categories.

Each bar in the chart represents the % of group A that are in group B as well.  So, for example, on the left of the chart you can see that out of everyone on Facebook, I’ve seen about 52% of them in the last year.  However, if you look under the “Seen in last year” column, you can see that of all the people that I’ve seen in the last year, 90% of them are on Facebook.

Note: the sets of “Met” and “Seen in last year” are not comprehensive, but only include people who are also on Facebook, Twitter, Livejournal, Flickr, or in my phonebook.

In any case, I mention this because I think it makes a good argument that when you have 665 friends on Facebook that it represents a group of people that are not in any way analog to your friends in real life.  Jonah Lehrer argued that we may even have less than typical empathy with our online friends.

I think that this project, for me, is revealing that my “online friends” simply represent a broader slice of people that I know, including my baker, my lawyer, my conference friends, my highschool friends, etc.  It’s not a qualitatively different circle than the normal circle of friends, it is simply the first time we have a way of visualizing the size of all the different people we run into during life and have brief (or strong) relationships with.

This entry was posted by Buster on Tuesday, February 10th, 2009 at 5:19 pm. It is filed under Friendsheet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.