
Why Your Friends Have More Friends Than You Do - malte
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/200911/why-your-friends-have-more-friends-you-do
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Anon84
This is relatively well known in (Complex) Network theory as applied to Social
Networks. You're always more likely to be connected to a Hub (someone with
high degree) that to a "leaf" (in the tree sense). If you plot the average
number of friends your friends have versus the number of your friends on a
log-log plot, you'll see a decreasing line. (See Fig. 2 of
<http://arxiv.org/abs/0909.0450> for a recent example).

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wgj
It looks like the only difference allowing for more friends is that those
people are specifically more likely to befriend people with fewer friends.
(Sue and Alice, in the example.) One could take away from this that the secret
to having many friends is to excel at befriending those who don't make friends
easily. In some cases, you may be the only friend they have.

