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Beat this! You just can’t have more than 200 friends on Facebook
London: If someone claims that he or she has over 1,000 friends on Facebook, he or she is probably lying.
According to an interesting research, the average number of real close friends people have on the social networking site is less than 200, and here too women triumph with more genuine friends than men.
According to psychologist professor Robin Dunbar from the University of Oxford who conducted two surveys, among regular social media users, the average number of friends they had on Facebook was 155 in the first survey and 183 in the second.
Women had more friends than men (in the first sample, women averaged 166 and men just 145 friends; in the second, it was 196 vs 157) while – perhaps unsurprisingly – older generations had fewer friends than younger ones, Dunbar found.
According to him, social media certainly help to slow down the natural rate of decay in relationship quality that would set in once we cannot readily meet friends face-to-face.
“But no amount of social media will prevent a friend eventually becoming ‘just another acquaintance’ if you don’t meet face-to-face from time to time,” Dunbar explained in a paper published in Royal Society Open Science journal.
“There is something paramount about face-to-face interactions that is crucial for maintaining friendships. Seeing the white of their eyes from time to time seems to be crucial to the way we maintain friendships,” he added.
Offline, research has given rise to what’s called the Social Brain Hypothesis. This says that our brain’s ability to process multiple relationships creates a natural group size of 100-200 people for humans.
This size is also constrained by the time required to maintain relationships – we only have so much time to devote to meeting or talking to people.
Social media may seem to be a way to make and maintain hundreds of friendships.
It has been suggested that social media might overcome the constraints because posts, tweets and pictures allow us to talk to many more people at the same time even if the interaction is not direct.
This prompted Dunbar to carry out two surveys of more than 3,300 people to see whether using the Internet really means we can have more friends.
The first survey group, made up of regular social media users, considered only 28 percent of their Facebook friends to be “genuine” (close) friends.
While a few people did have much larger groups of online “friends” on Facebook, they had similar sized support and sympathy groups to others.
This suggests that when social media seem to allow someone to have more friends, it is because looser acquaintances were being included in the ‘friend’ category.
“The research shows that face-to-face interaction is essential for truly authentic relationships and that shares, selfies and ‘likes’ are no replacement for the bonding that takes place while sharing food, experiences and anecdotes,” informed Sue Fudge, director at Dorset bakers Thomas J. Fudge’s.
International online casino Casino Days has published a report sharing their internal data on what types and brands of devices are used to play on the platform by users from the South Asian region.
Such aggregate data analyses allow the operator to optimise their website for the brands and models of devices people are actually using.
The insights gained through the research also help Casino Days tailor their services based on the better understanding of their clients and their needs.
Desktops and Tablets Lose the Battle vs Mobile
The primary data samples analysed by Casino Days reveal that mobile connections dominate the market in South Asia and are responsible for a whopping 96.6% of gaming sessions, while computers and tablets have negligible shares of 2.9% and 0.5% respectively.
The authors of the study point out that historically, playing online casino was exclusively done on computers, and attribute thе major shift to mobile that has unfolded over time to the wide spread of cheaper smartphones and mobile data plans in South Asia.
“Some of the reasons behind this massive difference in device type are affordability, technical advantages, as well as cheaper and more obtainable internet plans for mobiles than those for computers,” the researchers comment.
Xiaomi and Vivo Outperform Samsung, Apple Way Down in Rankings
Chinese brands Xiaomi and Vivo were used by 21.9% and 20.79% of Casino Days players from South Asia respectively, and together with the positioned in third place with a 18.1% share South Korean brand Samsung dominate the market among real money gamers in the region.
Cupertino, California-based Apple is way down in seventh with a user share of just 2.29%, overshadowed by Chinese brands Realme (11.43%), OPPO (11.23%), and OnePlus (4.07%).
Huawei is at the very bottom of the chart with a tiny share just below the single percent mark, trailing behind mobile devices by Motorola, Google, and Infinix.
The data on actual phone usage provided by Casino Days, even though limited to the gaming parts of the population of South Asia, paints a different picture from global statistics on smartphone shipments by vendors.
Apple and Samsung have been sharing the worldwide lead for over a decade, while current regional leader Xiaomi secured their third position globally just a couple of years ago.
Striking Android Dominance among South Asian Real Money Gaming Communities
The shifted market share patterns of the world’s top smartphone brands in South Asia observed by the Casino Days research paper reveal a striking dominance of Android devices at the expense of iOS-powered phones.
On the global level, Android enjoys a comfortable lead with a sizable 68.79% share which grows to nearly 79% when we look at the whole continent of Asia. The data on South Asian real money gaming communities suggests that Android’s dominance grows even higher and is north of the 90% mark.
Among the major factors behind these figures, the authors of the study point to the relative affordability of and greater availability of Android devices in the region, especially when manufactured locally in countries like India and Vietnam.
“And, with influencers and tech reviews putting emphasis on Android devices, the choice of mobile phone brand and OS becomes easy; Android has a much wider range of products and caters to the Asian online casino market in ways that Apple can’t due to technical limitations,” the researchers add.
The far better integration achieved by Google Pay compared to its counterpart Apple Pay has also played a crucial role in shaping the existing smartphone market trends.
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