"Followers are not Friends"

Yesterday, I was reading gigaom and scrolled through some of Om's posts and found this terrific post regarding research from the HP Social Lab:

On Twitter, he found that regardless of the number of followers or followees, there were very few friends in a personal Twitter circle. He used a very weak definition of “friend” — anyone to whom a user has directed a post at least twice. And because of that, Huberman says that in order to “influence a person’s absorption of content, there is a need to find the hidden social network; the one that matters when trying to rely on word of mouth to spread an idea, a belief, or a trend.”

Huberman’s study found that:

• Users with a large number of followers are not necessarily those with very large number of total posts.
  
• Even though the number of friends initially increases as the number of followees increases, after a while the number of friends starts to saturate and stays nearly constant.
  
• The number of people a user actually communicates with eventually stops increasing while the number of followees can continue to grow indefinitely.
  

What was powerful was the one graph that shows the saturation point that they discovered from the dataset they generated:
Now, add your other networks (Friendfeed, Facebook, LinkedIn, mySpace, Xing), your steady diet of blog posts, and then handle your email inbox, your incoming cell phone calls - can not imagine why a saturation point occurs.

Amazing.