Popular on Facebook

In Real Life I probably have around six or seven friends. Maybe one or two of these guys I see on a regular basis, the rest maybe a few times a year, and it often seems like an Herculean feat to get all of us in the same bar for a boys’ night.

Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook and Time magazine’s Person of the Year 2010, has over three million friends on the social network he co-created with some other guy whose name we can’t remember.

But if you believe the movie he had only one Real Life mate.

In the early stages of my Facebook existence I suffered from ‘friend envy’. Looking at the measly 20 in brackets, I spent hours trawling through other people’s friends lists, frantically searching for anyone I might’ve bumped into at a braai and said more than two words to.

Even guys from school I hadn’t seen in ten years – and didn’t like much then – cracked the virtual nod. And when they accepted, there was never much more than a “how u doing?” and that was it.

Oxford University professor of Evolutionary Anthropology, Robin Dunbar, from his study of social groupings throughout the ages – from cavemen around a fire to desk-jockeys around the water cooler – reckons that our neocortex (the bit of the brain that handles conscious thought and language) can only cope with 150 friends.

Sez he: “The interesting thing is that you can have 1,500 friends [on Facebook], but when you actually look at traffic on sites you see people maintain the same inner circle of around 150 people that we observe in the real world.”

That’s a stretch as far as I’m concerned, and an obscure blurring of the definitions of ‘friend’ and ‘associate’.

So who should we request to be our mate on FB? Those we see on a regular basis? A bit pointless when you think about it. The most you should type would be: Let’s get out of the house/office and meet for a beer.

Or maybe it’s people we like that have flown across the sea for a better life in greener-grass country? Makes sense; easier than a postcard and more fun than email. Nice in theory, but not like we’re going to check up and message them every day.

And only a couple of status updates and pics to peruse – boring!

But there are those who swear blind they are so popular they’ve got two thousand close confidantes – those hippies and addicts munching mushrooms at trance parties – and they care about every one of them.

Jimmy Kimmel, host of Jimmy Kimmel Live! on ABC, has a good way of separating true friends from people who’re just using you to boost their stats: "Let's say on Friday, post a status update that says, 'I'm moving this weekend and I need help.' The people who respond, those are your friends. Everyone else isn't."

I don’t think I’m brave enough for that.