I was picking on a friend recently about the fact that he had over 300 friends on Facebook. I asked him “Honestly, how many of those people could you or would you call for lunch this week?” He had to admit the number was a little lower than 300 people. Which got me thinking: what is a normal number of friends to have on Facebook? I’m reasonably well-networked in real life and have done a fair amount of events planning, so I’m acutely aware that a reasonably sociable person has less than ten close friends, and a range of acquaintances that typically extends to around 150 people. I’ve only used my Facebook account regularly for a few weeks, have around 60 “friends”, and am about to start adding and deleting with a little more focus. According to various small-scale studies, having an excessively large number of friends on Facebook suggests that one may have poor social judgment or be narcissistic. Any attempt to establish an optimal number of Facebook friends will have to factor in things like age, social class, and whether the person was an early user, when Facebook was college-only. These early users may have hundreds of friends, in spite of the fact that they rarely use the site. And then there are trophy friends to consider. How many friends do you have? What are they really worth? Well, according to this article, about 37 cents.