How many people can you be friends with? A new app helps you out

Photo credit: Pepe Pont .

A new app called Touch’d wants you to cut through all the clutter to identify and nurture your most important social relationships.

The premise of the app is that social networks are usually designed for engagement and don’t solve the problem of meaningful interaction. Furthermore, we may believe that we’re increasingly more social as our network grows, but in reality we’re neglecting those closest to us far more than we should.

When you download and install the app, it’ll prompt you to login through Facebook. It’ll then track which friends you’ve historically interacted with the most and curate a list of what it believes are your closest acquaintances.

Dunbar’s work on social behavior amongst primates aimed to uncover the maximum numbers of relationships we can handle.

Users are free to add more names from their address book if they think some people have been left out. The app will then notify you how long it’s been since you spoke to them and send you notifications from time to time reminding you to start a conversation. There are also status indicators on how “healthy” your relationships are, as well as how often you initiate conversations with others.

“The core issue we’re solving is that we live in a hyper-connected world, but the more connected we are, the less in touch we are,”
explains Muhammad Mansoor, founder of Touch’d. “We have lots of ways to talk to people and we’ve gathered so many people that we’re overloaded.”

“Try to recall who the ten people closest to you are and then recall how long it’s been since you actually spoke to them. It’ll actually take you a bit of time,” he adds.

Mansoor says he decided to be an entrepreneur after a desire to get out of his comfort zone. “I’ve been working cushy jobs for too long which didn’t push me to the limit. It got to a point where it was pretty clear I didn’t want to be doing this for the next 10 years.”

Photo credit: Pixabay .

Philosophical premise

The philosophical underpinnings of Touch’d hone around the research of British evolutionary psychologist Robert Dunbar. His work on social behavior amongst primates aimed to uncover the limit of the number of people with which we can comfortably maintain social relationships.

What Robin discovered was that there’s a direct correlation between the size of the neocortex and the size of the social group primates maintained. He extrapolated that to humans, who have a larger neocortex than primates, and came up with 150 – also known as the infamous Dunbar’s number.

We’re not looking to replace your existing network, but focus on a different need.