Study: Difficult to keep with on Twitter, Facebook friends

It is easy to find all these friends on your social networks, but follow with them can be very difficult.

A study conducted by researchers at Indiana University exchange rate the maximum number of friends, a user can really keep contact with on sites such as Twitter and Facebook to approximately 150 people.

Bruno Gonclaves and his colleagues studied the web of 380 million tweets sent by users of Twitter of 3 million over four years and concluded that early people tweeting most and increasing their number of friends Twitter until they become overwhelmed and walk back, focusing on the contacts they have stronger to connections. The point of saturation, researchers refer to it, is located approximately 150 friends.

British anthropologist Robin Dunbar predicted that same number than the maximum count of friends a person should be able to manage based on his study of other primates, and he did in the 1990s, long before that Twitter was never designed.

Social networking has allowed us to greatly expand our collection of casual contacts and knowledge, but when it comes to real friendships and regular social contacts, we are limited in how much we can follow.