Are You Less Popular Than Your Facebook Friends?
According to the Pew Center’s Internet and American Life Project, the average facebook user has 245 friends while the average facebook user’s friend has an average of 359 friends. Why is that? The reason could simply be that more people are likely to be friends with someone who is more popular than others, as the article suggests. Or it could be that when you first create a facebook page, you start off with 0 friends and friend request people who have already established an online network of friends. Another reason is simply how facebook is set up. We all know that the activity of those people whose pages we visit more often end up showing up at the very top of our newsfeed. Like this, people who have more friends and who you have more mutual friends with are more likely to show up in lists than people who remain more isolated.
This is a concrete example of what we have learned in class thus far. First off, facebook is all about creating your own personal network. Your friend may know a friend who knows a friend of yours that friend number 2 does not have any acquaintance with. Second, we can prove that this exists by mathematical proof by comparing the formulas between average number of friends of one person vs average number of friends of a friend. If we take the equation for variance and manipulate it to substitute into the equation for mean of friends of a friend, the end result is that the mean of number of friends is less than or equal to mean of number of friends of a friend.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/your-facebook-friends-have-more-friends-than-you/2012/02/03/gIQAuNUlmQ_story.html
http://mindyourdecisions.com/blog/2012/09/04/why-your-friends-have-more-friends-than-you-the-friendship-paradox/