Popularized by Tipping Point, Dunbar’s number suggests that there’s a limit to social cognition. Roughly speaking, 150 people can form a tight social group; any larger and closeness suffers. Inasmuch, we sacrifice intimacy and trade familiarity for breadth. Is there an optimal social mix?

I’m not critiquing Dunbar’s accuracy or claiming we cap our friendships at 150 people. (My 800 Facebook “friends” might think ill of me for saying so.) But, I inherently feel a physical limit to my intimate capacity: it’s impossibly difficult to know — to really know — a certain number of people. 

To achieve such feats in friendship, I trade intimacy for connectivity. There are ten people I have always been close with (family included), and another twenty or so that are close friends. Call it thirty.

Using 150 as a benchmark, this leaves 120 slots. Using my 800 Facebook-friends as an indicator of my extended network, this means that 800 fit into those 120 intimate slots. Very roughly speaking, I trade one close friend for 6.67 acquaintances.

By comparison, consider someone like Gary Vaynerchuk or Robert Scoble. Assume each has thirty close friends. Both hit the 5,000-friend limit on Facebook. That’s at least 42 acquaintances per close friend slot. That’s a lot of people. Both are connected to thousands more.

I wonder at what point, between the 800 I have and the 5,000 (and more) they have, can they not keep track of, let alone remember, those acquaintances.

What if I were to try to know — to really know — those 800 people I’m connected with. How far could I get?

Or would I just lose intimacy with everyone?

Is that what we’re doing to ourselves?

More: The Dunbar Number as a Limit to Group Sizes

Outside the SXSW Bloghaus in Austin last month, some guy was hanging near the door handing out wristbands. Me, a sucker for swag, approached the guy and said, “Hey, can I have one?” He turns to me, says ‘sure!’, and hands me a wrist band. “Thanks!” I said, “My name’s Michael. Who are you and what’s your story?” 

And that’s how I met Gary Vaynerchuk. Up until that moment, I hadn’t heard of Gary or winelibrary.tv. We spoke for a couple of minutes about how crazy I thought he was for answering his thousands of daily e-mails in lieu of delegating. Then it struck me as not so crazy: here’s a guy who cared so much about his job (wine) and his community that he made it his lifeblood. (I’m omitting a joke about transubstantiation right here.)

I ran into him later that night in the lobby of a hotel where about a hundred people had gathered. I went over to say hello but before I open my mouth he puts bottle of wine in my hand, “Gruen! Take this!” (I wasn’t wearing a name tag), raising another bottle to toast mine. At 2am, this man has energy.

“Gary, we’re so hanging out when we get back to New York.”

“Definitely! Now DRINK!” [sic]

…

Three days ago, I went to New York’s NextWeb Meetup and ran into Gary. Though we hadn’t talked since SXSW, he remembered me and we went right back to shooting the shit, with me making fun of his e-mailing habits.

So, it should come as no surprise that Gary could galvanize the social media world and beyond in an unedited two-minute video clip. Today is Good Person Day 2008, so spread it on.