According to research, the human mind cannot handle being friends with a circle larger than 50 people. In additiona, the brain has trouble handling a social network that has grown larger than 150 people. In response to this data, Dave Morin has started a potential competitor to Facebook called Path. Path is limited to 50 friends or less. It is designed for intimate relationships with close friends and family and to create a more intimate, and personal environment that would be more closed than the service provided on Facebook where friends list often break the barriers discovered in the Oxford research.
Morin claims that the smaller size will allow users to feel less self concious about what they post. But will it really? It will surround a particular identity and part of their life, and as such, there will still be a limit on what content is and is not appropriate. While Facebook may cross more spheres, there are many different places (other people’s walls or comments) where you can express yourself without being right out in the open for other people in your social network to see. Just because you are friends exclusively with close friends and family doesn’t mean you’ll feel safe in sharing certain things. Sometimes, in a crowd you can find anonymity.
I agree that the smaller size will probably not do much for making people feel more secure of confidential with their information. I am not sure about others, but I am pretty sure that most people are friends with less than 50 people on Facebook, or at least only regularly contact less than 50. Also, I doubt that while people may have more than 50 friends, I doubt that they really care about more than maybe 20 of them. It seems that while having less people may help with the social pressure, if you are limited to 50 friends what happens when you are at capacity and you have to choose between adding a friends and/or deleting a friend. Maybe that would create social pressure? Facebook is an interesting site in that it allows you to simultaneously enter many spheres and thus makes you access to people more universal. In this kind of network, you would be stuck in one character which could be restricting.
This sounds similar to MySpace before they had privacy controls and anyone could just access the profile. That forced you to show only one, public side of yourself and was more restricting. It will be interesting to see it this platform become successful.
I think the idea of having smaller groups will not allow for closer bonds, i think instead itll cause you to be more cautious about what you put on ur page because everyone will most likely see whatever you post since they are also only going to have 50 friends. The idea that we have so many friends on our profile allows us to still show different sides of ourselves to all of those people, and sometimes these identities collide but it happens less than it would if we only had 50 friends. I think that just like in life we want to interact with more than 50 people during our days. If you think about it 50 people is a little bit more than a normal size class, if you deal with these same people for more than a class period yes you may know a bit more about them but it gets boring. And after a while all of these people know way more about you then you wish for them to. The idea of being able to hide in the crowd is something we often treasure, maybe its because im a new yorker and i love to interact with alot of people and having different personas with all of these people, i do not agree with the idea of a 50 friend version of facebook.