Dunbar's number and language invented for social grooming

If we follow Prof. Dunbar's theory, social networks as a new communication tool is simply the advancement of natural language. The whole purpose is to make the social grooming more efficient. However, the efficiency has its limit - the magical Dunbar's number - about 150. The question is: by leveraging intelligent agents, can we handle relations beyond 150? Looks we are getting into a scifi scene - "I need your response in real person, not your program".

Dunbar's number from wikipedia:

Dunbar's number, which is 150, represents a theoretical maximum number of individuals with whom a set of people can maintain a social relationship, the kind of relationship that goes with knowing who each person is and how each person relates socially to every other person. Group sizes larger than this generally require more restricted rules, laws, and enforced policies and regulations to maintain a stable cohesion. Dunbar's number is a significant value in sociology and anthropology.

Dunbar's major work from Google Books

Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language
What a big brain we have for all the small talk we make. It's an evolutionary riddle that at long last makes sense in this intriguing book about what gossip has done for our talkative species. Psychologist Robin Dunbar looks at gossip as an instrument of social order and cohesion--much like the endless grooming with which our primate cousins tend to their social relationships.Apes and monkeys, humanity's closest kin, differ from other animals in the intensity of these relationships. All their grooming is not so much about hygiene as it is about cementing bonds, making friends, and influencing fellow primates. But for early humans, grooming as a way to social success posed a problem: given their large social groups of 150 or so, our earliest ancestors would have had to spend almost half their time grooming one another--an impossible burden. What Dunbar suggests--and his research, whether in the realm of primatology or in that of gossip, confirms--is that humans developed language to serve the same purpose, but far more efficiently. It seems there is nothing idle about chatter, which holds together a diverse, dynamic group--whether of hunter-gatherers, soldiers, or workmates. Anthropologists have long assumed that language developed in relationships among males during activities such as hunting. Dunbar's original and extremely interesting studies suggest otherwise: that language in fact evolved in response to our need to keep up to date with friends and family. We needed conversation to stay in touch, and we still need it in ways that will not be satisfied by teleconferencing, email, or any other communication technology. As Dunbar shows, the impersonal world of cyberspace will not fulfill our primordial need for face-to-face contact.From the nit-picking of chimpanzees to our chats at coffee break, from neuroscience to paleoanthropology, Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language offers a provocative view of what makes us human, what holds us together, and what sets us apart.

3 generations of social networks

So far, the evolution of social networks has been through three generations:

1G - Profile centric
The early social networks like friendster and myspace in 2005 emphasized user profile construction and sharing. The social graph is also part of the profile. Today, LinkedIn is still profile centric. A profile presents a user's static identity only. The persona presented is not yet a living creature, but quite useful when user wants to check out a new friend or contact.

2G - Activity centric
Users proactive interactions make persona live. In myspace, only the user comment area (message board) is the primary social interaction place, while the whole purpose of Facebook is to enable all sorts of social activities. After Facebook opened up its social platform, thousands of 3rd party social widgets flood in, making Facebook more activity centric. Activities keep users busy but may overload the users as well.

3G - Behavior centric
User's social behavior observed by others, mainly through passive or unintentional social message, is the trend of next generation of social networks. This is because behavior centric is more close to real life social interactions. One example is the body language in physical world. The behavior observation mechanism can be traced back to Facebook's innovative mini-feed and later beacon feature. The biological human can process the surrounding social messages efficiently. However, beacon as of today is extremely inefficient. Intelligent agents must be applied to partially automate the behavior observation. The recommendation or taste engines at Flixter, Amazon, Netflix, etc. are automated, though narrow banded to taste comparison only.

The 7th sense and intelligent client

I never waste my time on the sponsored links at my gmail client, but cannot avoid a glance on the web clip pulled from my del.icio.us subscription (pic below). After fighting through possible Google or del.icio.us ad keyword filtering algorithms, sometimes it's dumb smart as I keep "social" and "web2.0" two tags on the subscription.


This is an example of the rudimentary intelligent client at the 4th-tier with a service mashup (simply Google + del.icio.us at RSS level). In Marshall McLuhan's concept, technology, or this case in specific - the 4th-tier client, is an extension of human body. The client creates a digital human sensory system after seeing, listening, smelling, tasting, touching, and possible psyche power (the 6th sense). Technology builds up the human peripheral of the 7th sense for our cognition and perception at our digital environment.

Like our basic human sensory system, we can also develop the adaptive filtering capability in our 7th sense. In vision sensory, we can focus on the display items during window shopping, and totally ignore the reflective images on the glass (try to shoot a photo and see what you got). Similarly, I always unintentionally ignore Google ad sense content. My 7th sense was eventually trained in my brain by past negative experience (ad sense content is mostly noise to me).

PM's and developer's job is to relieve human burden at the 7th sensory, bottom line is to avoid the negative brain training for ignorance. Therefore, machine cooperated effective adaptive filtering should be built into the client, making the client intelligent. From technology side, semantic web (web3.0) will pave the path. Thereafter, the semantic powered intelligent agents (web4.0) will achieve higher level of machine intelligence, making sense for our 7th sense.

Mobile devices are naturally perfect human peripherals. The current widget trend will ease the construction of intelligent mobile clients. We will see the heated-up battle field of social apps on mobile world.