Separating Facebook users: 4.74 Degrees
January 11, 2012 5 Comments
Remember my less-than-epic, although very entertaining, quest to confirm or deny the famous Six Degrees of Separation experiment, originally conducted by Stanley Milgrim? My goal was to send out letters, as in the original experiment, and have those recipients do their best to get those letters to a named someone in Boston. Each link in the chain would write down their name on the letter, and, by the end, we’d have a list of how many people the letter went through to get to that final person.
You might remember that not one letter made it to my contact in Boston.
Many other groups have turned to Facebook to answer the question. Several failed, fake, or ineffective “Six Degrees” Facebook groups have popped up.
However, just a few months ago, the University of Milan partnered with Facebook to report that the average number of acquaintances separating any two people in the world was not six, but 4.74.
The new research used data from 721 million Facebook users, more than one-tenth of the world’s population. Facebook posted the results on their data facebook page.
From the New York Times article:
The experiment took one month. The researchers used a set of algorithms developed at the University of Milan to calculate the average distance between any two people by computing a vast number of sample paths among Facebook users. They found that the average number of links from one arbitrarily selected person to another was 4.74. In the United States, where more than half of people over 13 are on Facebook, it was just 4.37.
That being said, Facebook users are probably a self-selected bunch. In this case, the people who use Facebook are those who have online access and choose to use Facebook. They might be better connected individuals than those who do not use Facebook.
Importantly, this study raises questions about definitions like “friend,” “acquaintance,” or “guy you met one time on the bus.” Which of those actually counts as a connection?
Either way, it’s pretty exciting to know that we’re only a few introductions away from people like Hugh Laurie and David Cameron.*
*If anyone here is Facebook friends with them, let me know.
Nice article! A few years ago, back when everyone on Facebook belonged to the “Biggest Facebook Group Ever!” I would randomly open the profile of one of the group’s millions of members and attempt to link back to my own profile within a chain of six mutual friends (navigating mostly by college networks — e.g. everyone seemed to know *one* person who’d gone to Harvard). I always managed to find that connection, but, as you point out, the Facebook demographic back then was probably even more homogenous.
Hello! Just want to say thank you for this interesting article! =) Peace, Joy.
In the Arab world, part of the reason the number of facebook users have increased is due to its role in the recent revolutions, the other is wanting to keep in touch with friends. There is also lack of awareness of issues related to privacy. Personally, I truely believe that it’s unsafe to use facebook. I know friends whose accounts were hacked and I’ve read articles about the website’s privacy policy issue, yet I just can’t get myself to close my account. I’ve lived in so many places, and I found facebook to be the best tool to keep in touch with the friends I made in these places and staying up to date with their latest news. What I am considering now though is pulling down my photo albums and any personal information, and just keeping my name. Not sure if that’s enough, but it’s a start!
Hi There Gametheoryninja,
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Cheers
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