Eric Reasons

(First, let me apologize if this post is specific to Google+, a service most people aren't even allowed in yet. However, there's already a lot of chatter about what it is and what it is not, and I wanted to collect my thoughts.) It was sheer luck that a conversation I had a month ago led me to pen some thoughts about the qualities that can make or break social media platforms . At the time, I had no idea that Google+ was less than 30 days from launching it's "Field Test". In that post, I cite some literature on the "150-connection gap", which shows that the limit for social circles seems to settle in at about 150 real connections to real people, and that when you start interacting with more than those 150 real connections, you're acting as an Authority does to an Audience, not participating in a community/conversation. I then posit a hypothetical new social media service, and claim that if it can't "cross the 150-connection gap", then...

---150 Connections: The difference between a Community and an Audience--- I found myself in a conversation with friend and sometimes mentor, Nathan Hughes ( @ndh313 ), about the upper bound of one's social connections. Back in the 90's Robin Dunbar proposed an upper limit of around 150 real social connections (knowing who a person is and what their relationship is to you). Scientists have recently used Twitter as a laboratory to confirm that this number holds true , even with all the recent advances in social networking technology. This number has also been confirmed by actual practice throughout the range of human experiences , from hunter-gatherer societies to corporate organizations, to the U.S. military. In our new social media landscape, this limit seems to manifest itself in two interesting effects: Most of you have probably already observed the first effect, and it is unlikely to surprise you: those of us who follow hundreds or thousands on Twitter or Facebook will...