So is it a Geek Thing? / Facebook Friend Limit

I love words, and used to love William Safire's NY Times Magazine On Language column when he was around. I also enjoy other parts of the Sunday NY Times (although it often takes me the better part of the week to get through it).

The longer articles in the weekend paper analyze news of the week and provide context. This week's issue had two articles of that really caught my attention (so far).

The first, Follow My Logic? A Connective Word Takes the Lead, caught my eyes because of said word passion. It starts:

So this is about the word "so"

and goes on to describe the growing trend to use the word "so" at the beginning of a sentence:

“So” may be the new “well,” “um,” “oh” and “like.” No longer content to lurk in the middle of sentences, it has jumped to the beginning, where it can portend many things: transition, certitude, logic, attentiveness, a major insight.

The article quotes no less a prim and proper figure as Hillary Rodham Clinton's use of the word in this way. A little later, it states that the convention began in Silicon Valley:

So it is widely believed that the recent ascendancy of “so” began in Silicon Valley. The journalist Michael Lewis picked it up when researching his 1999 book “The New New Thing”: “When a computer programmer answers a question,” he wrote, “he often begins with the word ‘so.’ ” Microsoft employees have long argued that the “so” boom began with them.

This jibes with my experiences, as I am sure I have run into this more in my conversations in tech circles than elsewhere.

Another article caught my attention because of my enthusiasm for all things related to social media. Are 5001 Facebook Friends One too Many? discusses the theoretical and very real limits to the number of friendships one can maintain.

The Dunbar number, based on research (I have blogged about this) says that the number of friendships one can realistically maintain maxes out at 150. Facebook, on the other hand, seems to scoff at this number, and does not discourage gratuitous friending - that is until you hit 5000 friends. The article says:

What would be an impressive, even exhaustive, number of friends in real life is bush league for Facebook’s high rollers, who have thousands. Other social networks use less-intimate terminology to portray contacts (LinkedIn has “connections,” Twitter has “followers”), but Facebook famously co-opted the word “friend” and created a new verb.

Facebook discourages adding strangers as friends, adding that only a tiny fraction of its 400 million users have reached the 5,000 threshold, at which point Facebook wags its digital finger and says: That’s enough. The company cites behind-the-scenes “back-end technology” as the reason for the cutoff, implying that the system will implode at the sight of a 5,001st friend.

I found another great article to include in my roundup - this one on journalist blogs and editorial standards, and featured as today's post on the Social Fluency blog,

Comments

[Suzanne McGee]

Bob, thanks for pointing out "so." It amazes me to no end how many people are depending on this word. It ranks up there with "ya know." While words are plentiful, it seems that many aren't being more picky about what they use. I challenge PR pros to review their own vocabulary - it's the best tool of our trade.

[rgeller]

Agreed, thanks for reading and commenting, Suzanne