Recently, Cameron Marlow, helped publish some numbers regarding the nature of relationships on Facebook, finding that most people, while having upwards to a couple of hundred friends, only actively interact with about a dozen of them. This was consistent with other off-line studies that showed the people we actively correspond with and the people we are close with are quite finite in number — maybe even suggesting a limit in our capacity.
While the data crunching wasn’t meant to be empirical or conclusive, it did offer a look at a new class of relationships: the relationships we maintain passively, through products like the Facebook News Feed. The number of people in this relationship segment was significantly higher per individual. Whereas we communicated directly with about a dozen people, we passively maintained a relationship with about 30 people. Cameron describes this class of relationship management:
This consumption is still a form of relationship management as it feeds back into other forms of communication in the future. For instance, a high school friend uploads a photo of her new puppy and this photo appears in your News Feed. You click on the photo, browse through a host of other photos and discover that she has also gotten engaged, which may lead you to reach out to her.
I think there are meaningful parallels (baseless assumptions) one can draw between our capacity to maintain relationships and how we interact with websites.
Without my RSS reader, I oscillate between a handful of sites, outside of which, I struggle to find a new vector for my web surfing. There is the “core” group of sites that I visit very regularly with maybe a couple of dozen supporting sites where my visits are driven by a specific context (i.e. share a photo, read product reviews, post a link, etc.) or because I happen to remember about it. This list of core sites has not grown much in size, but members of that exclusive club are always changing.
A lot of consumer sites that are being created are done so under the pretense that they will be “destination sites” — a site a user will explicitly choose to visit for one reason or another. Assuming the number of our core sites remains relatively constant — achieving destination-site-mindshare is an uphill battle, since it means unseating an existent core site. Your value proposition needs to be that much greater. For that reason, most people visiting your site will be new and most of them will not come back.
I think this stresses the importance for your website to broadcast in some capacity and provide the means for people to maintain a passive relationship with your website, which in turn creates inroads for a more directed interaction down the line.
Addendum
For the fun of it, without the aid of my feeds, my current core sites for an information fix are:
What are your core sites?
Maybe even more interesting than trying to guess on the sites, if you use Safari 4, a screenshot of the Top Sites feature would probably be quite telling. (The Top Sites feature seems to support the idea that the list of sites we interact with most-often is rather finite.)
