Are you popular? Do you think?

You're the least popular among your gang on friends. You are, its true, it has even been proven.

Don’t believe it? Consider this: the average Facebook user has 245 friends, but the average friend on Facebook has 359 friends. That’s right. The average person on Facebook has fewer friends than their friends do, a phenomenon commonly known as the “Friendship Paradox”. It may be seem to odd to be true, but it is - for nearly everyone.

The friendship paradox as a phenomenon was first observed by the sociologist Scott L. Feld in 1991. One way to think about this is to remember when you first joined Facebook. When you first created a profile, you started out with 0 friends. The quickest way to get friends was to add people who were already on Facebook. And since these people were already using Facebook, they already had a huge lead in friend count. And each time you added a friend, those people got to increase their friend count too! So clearly, it’s not that hard to see why your friends would have more friends than you when you first joined.

Of course, as you invite more friends and make contacts you can certainly overtake people in the friend count. The friendship paradox is not about the time you joined. It’s about this: on average, you will tend to add friends of people who are popular because it’s a social game. This is not a complete explanation but it should give you the idea of why this happens. And in the end, the average Facebook user ends up having fewer friends than their friends do.

Now lets do a practical example: Imagine that A and B are friends, B is friends with everyone, C is friends with B and D, and D is friends with B and C. A has just 1 friend, B has 3 friends, C and D each has 2 friends. Now we will count the friends of friends. A is friends with B who has 3 friends. B is friends with everyone, which makes for 5 friends of friends. Similarly we will find C and D each has 5 friends of friends. If we do some quick calculations we find that the average person A has 2 friends but the average friend of A has 2.25 friends. This is the friendship paradox!

A good example of this is Twitter; users on Twitter in general follow more people than they have followers them selves. This is because people are more likely to follow those who are popular than those who are not.

Thus, over 98% of Twitter users are subject to the friendship paradox. Or are just not popular. Either or.