Technically Incorrect offers a slightly twisted take on the tech that's taken over our lives. 
 
 CNET 
 
 The word "friend" has always had a tricky meaning. 
 
 We love to make others believe we have lots of friends. Then we sit at home on a Saturday night, staring at our phones and wondering why we have nowhere to go. 
 
 This is something that, I suspect, Facebook appreciated very early on. 
 
 By giving you access to the whole of cheery humanity, you could amass a virtual tribe whom you could tell (lie to) about your wonderful life. 
 
 How many of your Facebook friends would, though, come through if you needed, you know, a real friend? 
 
 Robin Dunbar, professor of evolutionary psychology at Oxford University, thought he'd find out. He wondered whether services such as Facebook really did allow humans to maintain much larger social networks. 
 
 His conclusion is both bracing and reassuring: "There is a cognitive constraint on the size of social networks that even the communication advantages of online media are unable to overcome." 
 
 Yes, we might have 150 or even 5,000 Facebook friends, but our true relationship with the majority of these people is essentially insignificant. 
 
 Dunbar looked at two UK studies undertaken in the first week of April 2015 and the third week of May 2015. They were not, unlike many studies of social networks, conducted among only students. Instead, Dunbar says they were representative across the 18 to 65 age range. The total sample was 3,375. 
 
 The average number of Facebook friends possessed by these people was around 150. (Women have larger social networks than men.) 
 
 The crux of the matter was simple. When asked how many "genuine" friends they had on Facebook, people in one sample offered an average answer of 27.6 percent. 
 
 When asked, however, how many of these Facebook friends they could depend on during an emotional or social crisis, the respondents said the number was four (actual average 4.1). Around 14 (actual average 13.6), the respondents said, would express sympathy. There was very little age variation in this. 
 
 For Dunbar, online activity reflects offline life. He writes in his research report: "The sizes of the two inner friendship circles did not differ from those previously identified in offline samples." 
 
 But what about those with a lot of Facebook friends? They have a far more active and loving social life, surely. 
 
 Perhaps not: "Respondents who had unusually large networks did not increase the numbers of close friendships they had, but rather added more loosely defined acquaintances into their friendship circle." 
 
 As in real life, younger people have larger social networks than older. When you're older, you can usually spot a fake a little more quickly. Usually. 
 
 Facebook didn't immediately respond to a request for comment on the study. 
 
 In the end, all we have is time. So, as Dunbar says, there is "a relationship between time invested in a relationship and its quality (as rated in terms of emotional closeness)." 
 
 Your brain can only take so much friendship -- and so much Facebook friendship. Your emotions can only be shared with a few people. Facebook is, indeed, a time-sink, not a glorious new syncing of souls. 
 
 Dunbar does, however, offer a quaint solution as to how to maintain true friendships. 
 
 "Friendships, in particular, have a natural decay rate in the absence of contact, and social media may well function to slow down the rate of decay. However, that alone may not be sufficient to prevent friendships eventually dying naturally if they are not occasionally reinforced by face-to-face interaction," he says. 
 
 Seeing people in real life. What a curious way to go about things. 

 Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period. 

 How many friends can you have? For years, science has said that the limit is about 150. Has Facebook — or other social networks, for that matter — managed to change anything? Can the Internet help us maintain more friendships? 
 
 An Oxford anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist who is one of the leading experts on those questions decided to take a look. And for the latter question, Robin Dunbar found that the answer is largely no, even for social media users who friend others freely. 
 
 Dunbar, who gave his name to “Dunbar’s number” (which refers to that 150-person limit on casual friendships for any given individual) published his findings from a study of 3,000 adults in Royal Society Open Science this month. 
 
 Distribution of network size for the two different samples in this study. (Credit: Royal Society Open Science) 
 
 “Given the extensive use of social media, the question as to whether Internet-based social networking sites have a positive or negative impact on social relationships has been much debated,” Dunbar wrote. “Cyberpessimists have argued that the Internet has detrimental effects on our social life. In contrast, cyberoptimists have insisted that the effects have been beneficial in many different ways.” 
 
 [From the archives: an unmanageable circle of friends] 
 
 Dunbar outlines several levels of friendships and relationships in his work. According to his model, each person can maintain about five people in their support group of closest friends, about 15 people in a sympathy group who are close enough to confide in, about 50 close friends, about 150 casual friends and about 500 acquaintances. In all, Dunbar’s work indicates that any given human can identify about 1,500 faces, total. 
 
 The numbers aren’t exactly the same for everyone. For instance, Dunbar writes that there is some variation in size across personality, age and sex. 
 
 Dunbar’s recent results indicate that social networks stay about the same size as outlined above, even with the expanse of online “friendships” that are theoretically available on sites such as Facebook. 
 
 “The constraints that limit face-to-face networks are not fully circumvented by online environments,” Dunbar writes. “Instead, it seems that online social networks remain subject to the same cognitive demands of maintaining relationships that limit offline friendships.” 
 
 Reported sizes for sympathy group and support clique. Credit: Royal Society Open Science 
 
 So why do “friend” groups get so large on Facebook? It might have something to do with how social networking sites label connections — most sites don’t allow users to sort friends by Dunbar layer. On Facebook, you can “friend” or “unfriend, even though users with larger networks are actually expanding their “friend” list with lots and lots of acquaintances, Dunbar concluded. 
 
 Friendship isn’t entirely blind to online connection, however: Although Facebook can’t give you more friends, it can help you maintain friendships through online contact that might otherwise deteriorate. 
 
 [How Facebook knows who all your friends are, even better than you do] 
 
 Friendships change, and not always for the better: Your connection to a member of that coveted circle of five best friends can “decay” over time without contact. 
 
 “Social media may well function to slow down the rate of decay,” Dunbar concluded. “However, that alone may not be sufficient to prevent friendships eventually dying naturally if they are not occasionally reinforced by face-to-face interaction.” 
 
 There’s one more big outstanding question here: What about the teens? Dunbar’s study focused on adults, in part because children and teens “are relatively poor at judging relationship quality,” and because teenagers tend to be more “exploratory” in their use of social media to find new friends — a phenomenon that is different from the general population. 
 
 But Dunbar also speculates that other aspects of teenage social media use might support his research findings, indicating that even for more exploratory teens, the task of maintaining large social networks eventually hits a limit. Particularly of interest to Dunbar? Teenagers have moved away from using open-ended sites such as Facebook as their primary social networks and instead rely on a handful of ever-changing, more private services, such as Snapchat. 
 
 Liked that? try these: 
 
 Facebook may know you better than your friends and family, study finds 
 
 Friends Reunited, one of the Internet’s oldest social networks, dies at 16 
 
 Facebook is making it harder for you to ‘forget’ your friends’ birthdays
– Social media may make managing friendships logistically easier, but perhaps unsurprisingly, Facebook and the like aren't actually helping you grow your circle of true friends. So reports evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar this month in the journal Royal Society Open Science, after analyzing research conducted in April and May of 2015 involving 3,375 people ages 18 to 65. While women typically have larger social circles than men, the average number of Facebook friends among this sample was 150, reports CNET. But the average number of friends one can truly count on in a crisis is just four—which reflects one's offline numbers, and is remarkably consistent across backgrounds, gender, and age. Dunbar defines several friendship levels, each panning out from the four or five closest friends the average person maintains, reports the Washington Post. From there, most of us widen the circle of "sympathy" friends we feel we can confide in to 15, and widen it again to 50 friends who are "close." Most of us can't seem to maintain much more than 150 "casual" friends, though, and the typical realm of total acquaintances tops out at 500. Even those with thousands of Facebook friends aren't necessarily more social, Dunbar concludes: "Respondents who had unusually large networks did not increase the numbers of close friendships they had, but rather added more loosely defined acquaintances into their friendship circle." And while social media can help slow the natural rate of "decay" that occurs over time, "that alone may not be sufficient to prevent friendships eventually dying naturally if they are not occasionally reinforced by face-to-face interaction," he adds. (Meanwhile, here's why Facebook was touting 46-year friendships recently.)