Your Facebook friends real or not?

As the telegraph.co.uk and theage.com.au publish stories about facebook friends, I ask the question Facebook friends, real or not?

According to the telegraph.co.uk they are just virtual but theage.com.au has a different view.

Here are the two articles and I ask you real or not??

the telegraph.co.uk: Technology: Facebook friends are virtual, finds Oxford University study by Stephen Adams

Facebook friends are virtual, finds Oxford University study

Facebook might give us the ability to have thousands of friends but it does nothing to expand how many we keep in real life, an Oxford University study has found

For humans appear incapable of maintaining more than about 150 active relationships, according to Robin Dunbar, a professor of evolutionary anthropology.

He arrived at that figure – coined ‘Dunbar’s number’ – in the 1990s.

Recent study into how social networking sites affect Dunbar’s number indicates that that advances in technology have not been matched by changes in mental capacity.

When he looked at how people use sites like Facebook, Bebo and MySpace, he found that those with lots of ‘friends’ only interact with a relatively small proportion of them.

“The interesting thing is that you can have 1,500 friends but when you actually look at traffic on sites, you see people maintain the same inner circle of around 150 people that we observe in the real world,” he told The Sunday Times.

While “people obviously like the kudos of having hundreds of friends” the reality was that their social circle was unlikely to be bigger than anybody else’s.

His earlier research claimed that people limit the number of real relationships they have in complex societies, because the part of our brains that cope with language and personal interaction cannot deal with any more.

theage.com.au: Technology Your Facebook friends can be real, after all by Nicky Phillips

Parents who worry that their children spend too much time on social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace can relax.

A study suggests that the idea that teenagers with hundreds of cyber friends are socially inept and compensating for face-to-face friendships is a myth.

Instead, researchers in the US found, well-adjusted young people were more likely to use social networking. In a study eight years ago the researchers assessed the popularity and social adjustment of 92 teenagers, then aged 13 to 14.

The research team, led by Assistant Professor Amori Mikami, of the University of Virginia, eight years later reviewed the same group, now aged 20 to 22, most of whom were members of social networking sites. They counted the number of cyber friends they had, and determined the quality of those friendships. Professor Mikami said those adults who were well-adjusted and had many friends were more likely to be using social networking sites.

And the quality of those friendships online was as good as the quality of their face-to-face relationships.

”The best-adjusted young people were far more likely to use social media as an extension of their positive friendships,” said Professor Mikami, whose study is published in the journalDevelopmental Psychology.

But the reverse applied to young people who were not well adjusted. They were more likely to display material that was hostile and inappropriate.

Ian Hickie, of the Brain and Mind Research Institute at the University of Sydney, said social networking sites allowed teenagers to interact with their friends seven days a week and reinforced the importance of interaction.