Last week while reading Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, I read about the rule of 150 or neocortex ratio. Stating why a group/ team when exceeds 150 starts losing the effectiveness or the relationship starts dipping, the reasoning was an average human mind cannot effectively map people beyond 150. For the same reason, in military the units don't have men beyond 200, despite advancement in communication technology.
This thought made me to start looking at my 250+ contact on mobile, 300 odd friends on Facebook and about the same number on Linkedin. Though there is nothing wrong in having a large connections/contacts, when in an opportunity or situation, whom did I contact or thought off, what was the top of the mind recall? It was again the same contacts or friends, it was never those rarely called/contacted numbers.
So I started mentally classifying my contacts on social network, as
1 Replying/commenting on their status
2 Enjoyed/looked forward to reading their posting
3 Glanced through their status
4 Ignored their status or posting, and scrolled to next
5 Removed status updates from few.
Over 50% of my connections fell in category 3, and it didn't bother me (nor them, I guess) as I haven't replied/commented on their status for a long time, they are just there. Another 10% fell in type 4, as the information from them was irrelevant or was of not much use to me, and these (type 4) connections over a period moved to type 5. It was actually only that about 40% of my connections I was able to follow, which clearly came down to about 120+, thus approving neocortex ratio.
This rule has worked for me, but I have friends who have connections crossing 500 and some 1500, I really want to know if same rule applies to them. Let me know.
