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A recent study on the social habits of facebookers confirms what British anthropologist Robin Dunbar posited in the early nineties: that a person is capable of real friendship with 150 people, no more. The average size of a Stone Age village – plus ça change, as one twitterer remarked yesterday.

But that doesn’t stop people from wanting more. Facebook friend collectors -- people determined to hit the maximum of 5,000 -- are a well-documented phenomenon, and just recently, companies began selling Twitter followers on eBay. Fifty-three dollars (U.S.) will get you 5,500 new devotees -- and no doubt each and every one of them will be someone else looking to boost their own numbers.

Popularity is frighteningly easy to measure online. It’s hard not to get caught up in its pursuit: The Web is perfectly designed to pique self-interest and monitor individual success. Googling yourself is just the latest version of looking in a mirror, if indeed you cast a reflection at all. Formspring and its ilk -- most recently (and evilly) failin.gs -- provide the opportunity for anonymous sadists to let willing victims know what the world thinks of them.

Much as I want to, even I can’t avoid Twitter’s metrics, which tell me how many followers I have compared with how many people I follow. It’s like my personality is a stock whose worth I'm constantly, furtively monitoring. As if it weren’t enough to merit your existence that way, you can now calculate a dollar value on your Twitter persona. According to tweetvalue.com, mine is worth $106 -- barely enough for an hour of therapy. Is there nothing the Internet cannot commodify?

How about philanthropy? Just last week, Pepsi announced that it had broken its 23-year tradition of advertising during the Super Bowl in favour of a new campaign -- a kind of Pepsi-does-Oprah thing called “Refresh” -- which will be driven by social media. In a stunning example of how a canny marketer can pick up on a trend -- online activism -- and combine it with a get-good-karma-quick scheme, the Refresh campaign invites people to conceive of philanthropic causes that should receive grants from the company. Others can then vote on their worthiness. Currently in first place for a $250,000 grant is a proposal to expand Freecycle, an online network which pairs would-be discards with people who can use them.

Putting aside the fact that this is, at bottom, an advertising campaign, there is another ambivalent facet to it. Let’s be honest: the Net is the ultimate hype machine -- this is the mechanism, after all, that gave us the viral video. Trending Topics on Twitter; the most-read news stories on a website; the first hit you get from a Google search -- they all heave into your consciousness because other people have already deemed them worthy. Popularity breeds popularity, as a recent Rapleaf study of Twitter followersconfirmed. There’s a mystical tipping point at which people will begin glomming on to a thing because others have first, especially when time is at a premium (and when, online, isn’t it?). That’s why people with the highest number of followers on Twitter continue peaking, that’s why the iPad launch ground the Web to a halt and that’s why Pepsi’s top causes will not necessarily be the best ones. Instead, they will be the ones that, at some early point, rose to the top, thereafter attaining eternal buoyancy.

It’s not that individual popularity is meaningless, exactly. It’s just that it doesn’t mean what we think it means.

Follow Lisan Jutras on Twitter @lisanjutras