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.

Filed under news, Opinion, review, trends Tagged with , , , , , , ,

The Future of the Internet: Reputation (Part 2 of 3)

July 9, 2011 2 Comments

Today, at the World Future Society 2011 Conference, I joined members of the Weiner, Edrich, & Brown team on a panel about Youth Trends.  I identified three trends related to the internet and social media.

Disclaimer: I am a Googler, however, nothing in this post has been influenced by confidential information or is a commentary on any insider knowledge about any of the topics I might be addressing.

(First Trend: Real Names)

Reputation

Increasingly, internet users are considering the reputation of organizations before they put their data into those organizations’ websites.

In the early days of the internet, few organizations had been around long enough to have an established reputation of any sort.  Not only that, but the implications of giving your information, or data, to a website weren’t clear.  Some might argue the implications are still not clear.

When end-users enter their information into a website, most are not sure where that information goes.  When users enter information into websites, they don’t really know where that information goes, or what the website does with it.  This could be for a variety of reasons.

  • End-users don’t read the privacy policies.
  • Privacy policies are written in legal-ese – even if end-users do read them, they aren’t elucidating.
  • Companies do not have policies surrounding end-user data.
  • Companies do have policies surrounding end-user data, and don’t want end-users to know what those policies are.

Google+ is a new social networking site, hosted, obviously, by Google.  The importance of company reputation, in the social networking space, can be summed up by this comic:

Up next: Regulation

Edit 7/17.  Check out this Doghouse Diaries comic on Legalese:

Filed under conference, Opinion, talk, trends, World Future Society Tagged with , , , ,

The Future of the Internet: Real Names (Part 1 of 3)

July 9, 2011 2 Comments

Today, at the World Future Society 2011 Conference, I joined members of the Weiner, Edrich, & Brown team on a panel about Youth Trends.  I identified three trends related to the internet and social media.

Disclaimer: I am a Googler, however, nothing in this post has been influenced by confidential information or is a commentary on any insider knowledge about any of the topics I might be addressing.

Real Names

The internet has traditionally been viewed as the Wild West of technology.  It has been an unspoiled frontier, waiting to be discovered, tamed, and understood.

Part of that mystery and allure has been the ability traipse around the internet anonymously.  Sites like 4chan, Omegle, and Chatroulette, are based on the anonymous nature of internet interaction. Even traditional chat clients like AIM, gaming websites like Kongregate, of social media outlets like Twitter, only ask for a username – a made up nickname – that doesn’t have to be your real name.

Increasingly, the internet is shifting towards a model based more on individual accountability.  Facebook has algorithms that attempt to detect whether or not you’ve put in a real name.  Google+ is asking users to input their real names, too. Right now, the internet is trending towards asking users for their real names.

This confirmation of identity has to be the next step in the evolution of the internet. Without confirmed identities, the internet will never act as a forum for highly secure transactions, such as serious banking or voting.

Of course, there will always be proponents of anonymity.  Christopher Poole is one such proponent. On the internet, he’s known as Moot. Moot is the founder of 4chan, and, more recently, Canvas, both of which are anonymous message boards.  A few years ago, he spoke at TED, creating a case for anonymity.  The video is definitely worth watching.

Up next: Reputation

Filed under conference, Opinion, TED, trends, World Future Society Tagged with , , , , ,

Fail Fast: Six Degrees of Separation 2.0

May 25, 2011 7 Comments

About three months ago, I embarked on a 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.

Well, it’s time to report out on that experiment.  Get ready to have your mind blown.

Not one letter made it to my contact in Boston.

Possible reasons:

  1. The letters got raptured on Saturday.
  2. The letters were digitized and stored in Amazon’s cloud, next to Lady Gaga’s music.
  3. People don’t send letters anymore.
My subjects – the initial recipients of the letter – primarily consisted of young Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.  Despite including about $4 of stamps in each envelope, I’m guessing that most of the initial recipients didn’t actually send their original letter.  Snail mail is inefficient, and, outside of the Google mailboxes, I’m not even sure where I would go to find our local post office.
So, let’s look at the next iteration of social connection: the internet.  We’ll turn to Wikipedia for a rundown of experiments that have been done to test for these sorts of connections on computers.

In 2001, Duncan Watts, a professor at Columbia University, attempted to recreate Milgram’s experiment on the internet, using an e-mail message as the “package” that needed to be delivered, with 48,000 senders and 19 targets (in 157 countries). Watts found that the average (though not maximum) number of intermediaries was around six.

A 2007 study by Jure Leskovec and Eric Horvitz examined a data set of instant messages composed of 30 billion conversations among 240 million people. They found the average path length among Microsoft Messenger users to be 6.6 (some now call the theory, “the seven degrees of separation” because of this.).

It has been suggested by some commentators that interlocking networks of computer mediated lateral communication could diffuse single messages to all interested users worldwide as per the 6 degrees of separation principle via Information Routing Groups, which are networks specifically designed to exploit this principle and lateral diffusion.

Right now, due to the mass amount of social data on the site, Facebook is probably our best bet for measuring something like this.  However, that would probably be an invasion of privacy.  Also, don’t join any groups that claim to be a “Six Degrees of Separation” project.  None of them have any way of measuring that, and are probably just initiatives to create ever-larger groups on Facebook.
Twitter might be another outlet for measuring degrees of separation.  However, I follow people like Conan O’Brien on Twitter, and I’m pretty sure that wouldn’t count as a connection.  Alternatively, perhaps it does, and we need to redefine what constitutes a degree of separation in the digital world.
All in all, while this experiment was ultimately a failure, I think it tentatively confirms the hypothesis that the younger generations don’t send snail mail much.  But that’s not something the US Postal Service couldn’t have told us.

Filed under Opinion Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

Don’t Fail to Scale

October 25, 2010 Leave a comment

Shai Goldman

Next, we discussed scaling.  In “Don’t Fail to Scale,” moderated by Director of Silicon Valley Bank Shai Goldman, we heard from the following panelists:

This is one of the panels I was particularly looking forward to - FriendFeed, Etsy, and Formspring are all very interesting, very popular websites.

Scaling is a problem that every startup hopes to have.  Essentially, once the startup takes off, the founders have to figure out how to deal with dramatically increased demand for their product or service in a short period of time.

Not surprisingly, the panel focused on technology.  Since each of the panelists represents a website, their problems were very similar: How do we deal with increased traffic to our websites?  The solutions tended to be technological, obviously – what’s the best hardware to use?  The best software?  Do we own our technology, share it, or outsource processes to the cloud?

One problem that it seemed the panelists ran in to was staying on the cutting edge of technology.  However, they all agreed that their job is run a company, not beta-test new software and hardware.

Dickerson made an important point: part of ensuring uptime for a website is making sure you have the right people on board.  When scaling, ”Put processes in place so the people you bring on are productive immediately,” Dickerson said.  ”Give them real things to do.”  There are no shortcuts on hiring, either – make sure you get the best people for the job.

Filed under failcon Tagged with , , , ,

← Older posts

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 408 other followers