Check out this excerpt:
You spend your time tweeting, friending, liking, poking, and in the few minutes left, cultivating friends in the flesh. Yet sadly, despite all your efforts, you probably have fewer friends than most of your friends have. But don’t despair — the same is true for almost all of us. Our friends are typically more popular than we are.
Don't believe it? It's the friendship paradox. Similar to how when you go to the gym you feel like a below-average person there in terms of fitness -- because you probably are. It's all about weighted averages. The people at the gym more often are the ones that go more often. The friends you connect with on Facebook are the type of people to generally connect with more people. The authors found:
... a user’s friend count was less than the average friend count of his or her friends, 93 percent of the time...
Check out the
NYT article for more examples. (Thanks, Joyce!)
