A personal relationship tracker
Keep the people who matter in orbit.
Orbits tracks the rhythm of real contact with your five, fifteen and fifty closest people, and tells you who to reach out to when it is due. No streaks. No daily check-in. Nothing to feed.
Private by designWorks offline
One list. Three tenses.
Open Orbits and there is one list: what is due now, what is coming up, and what you still need to fill in. Every row has the same three choices. Log the contact, keep things as they are, or let someone fade. When there is nothing to do, it says so.
Rings you earn, not lists you curate.
Nobody is placed in a ring by hand. Orbits reads the rhythm of your contact, weighs recent months more than old ones, and gives long friendships more slack. A ring shows how you actually keep in touch.
- Inner 5about every 2 weeks
- Close 15about every 3 weeks
- Companions 50about every 6 weeks
- Active 150about every 3 months
No quota. People come in bursts.
You will see six people in one weekend and nobody for a fortnight. Orbits shows what is due, not a streak to protect and not five things to do today. When there is nothing to log, there is nothing to do.
Honest about work.
The colleagues you see every day really do occupy your inner rings. Orbits shows that plainly, and still works to make room for the people you would rather have there, saying exactly what it would take.
Yours alone.
Everything stays on your device. No account, no server, no copy of your friends anywhere else. Back it up with one tap, and take it with you.
Why five, fifteen, fifty, one hundred and fifty.
In 1992 the anthropologist Robin Dunbar showed that a primate's neocortex size predicts the size of its social group, and extrapolated a natural human group of about 150. Later work found that inside that 150 we keep a nested set of layers, each roughly three times the last: about 5 people we lean on, 15 we are close to, 50 we see regularly, and 150 we would greet as friends. Beyond them, some 500 acquaintances and 1,500 faces we can put a name to.
The layers are made of time.
What puts someone in a layer is how often you are in touch: roughly weekly for the inner five, monthly for the fifteen, yearly for the 150. Let contact lapse and emotional closeness decays with it. Family is the exception, and holds far longer without contact than friendship does. Orbits is built on exactly this: rings come from the rhythm of contact, and family is given more grace.
Your pattern persists, the people change.
Studies of phone records show each person has a stable "social signature", a characteristic way of spreading attention across their layers that survives even as the individuals in each layer turn over. That is why Orbits tracks the rhythm you actually keep rather than asking you to sort people into lists by hand.
Why bother.
A meta-analysis of 148 studies covering more than 300,000 people found that strong social relationships go with a 50 percent higher likelihood of survival over the study periods, an effect comparable to quitting smoking. Ties do not maintain themselves; they are kept by contact.
The number is a shape, not a law.
The 150 has been contested: a 2021 re-analysis argued the statistical range around it is too wide to name a single number. Orbits does not depend on the exact figure. It depends on the layered structure, the ratio between layers, and the decay of closeness without contact, which have held up across cultures, cards, phones and online networks.
Reading
- 1992 Dunbar, R. I. M. Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates. Journal of Human Evolution 22, 469–493.
- 2003 Hill, R. A. & Dunbar, R. I. M. Social network size in humans. Human Nature 14, 53–72.
- 2005 Zhou, W.-X., Sornette, D., Hill, R. A. & Dunbar, R. I. M. Discrete hierarchical organization of social group sizes. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 272, 439–444.
- 2010 Holt-Lunstad, J., Smith, T. B. & Layton, J. B. Social relationships and mortality risk: a meta-analytic review. PLoS Medicine 7, e1000316.
- 2011 Roberts, S. G. B. & Dunbar, R. I. M. Communication in social networks: effects of kinship, network size, and emotional closeness. Personal Relationships 18, 439–452.
- 2012 Sutcliffe, A., Dunbar, R., Binder, J. & Arrow, H. Relationships and the social brain: integrating psychological and evolutionary perspectives. British Journal of Psychology 103, 149–168.
- 2014 Saramäki, J., Leicht, E. A., López, E., Roberts, S. G. B., Reed-Tsochas, F. & Dunbar, R. I. M. Persistence of social signatures in human communication. PNAS 111, 942–947.
- 2016 Mac Carron, P., Kaski, K. & Dunbar, R. Calling Dunbar's numbers. Social Networks 47, 151–155.
- 2021 Lindenfors, P., Wartel, A. & Lind, J. "Dunbar's number" deconstructed. Biology Letters 17, 20210158.
Coming soon.
Orbits is in private use today and opens to everyone shortly. Check back here at useorbit.com.