They say you can tell a lot about a person by the company they keep. Joel Jewitt is inclined to agree.

Upon reviewing your social networking friend list, Jewitt and his colleagues at the San Francisco-based data-mining firm Rapleaf say they can help predict which ads you’ll pay attention to and whether or not you’re a worthwhile risk for a credit card or a loan–all without hacking into any accounts or breaking any laws.

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OK, the title may be a slight exaggeration, but the data from a new study by the social-contact search site Rapleaf is nonetheless interesting.

In what they claim is the largest social-network study ever done, Rapleaf looked at the social connections of both men and women. All told, they collected data from over 30 million people on sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Flickr, Hi5 and others.

Interestingly, when you focus on users with fewer connections (well, relatively speaking–we’re talking about one group of people with between 1 and 100 connections, and another with between 100 and 1,000), women tend to have more friends than men. However, when you get to a really large number of connections (1,000 to 10,000, and also 10,000-plus), men have more friends.

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