Grooming on facebook

Here’s an interesting article from The Economist about facebook.  It points out that Facebook features such as commenting on photos or posting on walls are an online equivalent to the grooming behavior observed in primates, and the vast amount of data you make available to Facebook is likely to be studied with that in mind.  It also supplies some statistics, courtesy of Facebook’s “in-house sociologist“:

• 120: the average number of friends in a man’s Facebook network (women have “somewhat more”)
• 10: how many of a woman’s friends actually get that woman to respond to any of their postings (for men the number is 7)
• 26: for a woman with 500 Facebook friends, how many of them on average get that woman to respond (for men with 500 friends, the number is 17)

So as you grow your network, you’re mostly enlarging the number of people you monitor passively.

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