“We are close, in a sense, to people who don’t necessarily like us, sympathize with us or have anything in common with us,” Dr. Jon Kleinberg, a computer science professor at Cornell and a faculty adviser to an author of the new study, said some links might be more meaningful than others. “My own notion of what a friend is has evolved,” he said. But, he said, the Internet might have altered the definition. “There is an issue of how many friends you actually have,” he said. Eric Horvitz, a Microsoft researcher who led the study in 2008, said that network was based on people who exchanged messages, rather than those who identified as “buddies.” Though the study was by far the largest of its kind, it raised questions about definitions of terms like “friend” on Facebook.Ī Microsoft study in 2008, using a more conservative definition of friend, found an average chain of 6.6 people in a group of 240 million who exchanged chat messages. “When considering even the most distant Facebook user in the Siberian tundra or the Peruvian rain forest,” the company wrote on its blog, “a friend of your friend probably knows a friend of their friend.” The caveat there is “Facebook user” - like the Milgram study, the cohort was a self-selected group, in this case people with online access who use a particular Web site.
![4 degrees of separation 4 degrees of separation](https://rossdawson.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/4degreeschart.jpg)
In the United States, where more than half of people over 13 are on Facebook, it was just 4.37. They found that the average number of links from one arbitrarily selected person to another was 4.74. 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. The findings were posted on Facebook’s site Monday night. The new research used a slightly bigger cohort: 721 million Facebook users, more than one-tenth of the world’s population. The original “six degrees” finding, published in 1967 by the psychologist Stanley Milgram, was drawn from 296 volunteers who were asked to send a message by postcard, through friends and then friends of friends, to a specific person in a Boston suburb. The majority of your Facebook friends also likely live in the same region as you do, and are around the same age as you.The world is even smaller than you thought.Īdding a new chapter to the research that cemented the phrase “six degrees of separation” into the language, scientists at Facebook and the University of Milan reported on Monday that the average number of acquaintances separating any two people in the world was not six but 4.74. For instance, the average Facebook user has 190 friends, and only 10 percent of users have fewer than 10 Facebook friends. In addition to proving that it has narrowed the space between two people, Facebook also discovered a few other interesting tidbits about its social graph. “The degrees of separation between any two Facebook users is smaller than the commonly cited six degrees, and has been shrinking over the past three years as Facebook has grown,” the company more eloquently said in a note posted to the site.įor two Facebook users in closer proximity, the distance is even shorter: Most pairs of folks in the same country are separated by just three degrees. What’s that mean? Well, simply put, you’re now only four (as opposed to six) degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon - on Facebook. “99.6% of all pairs of users are connected by paths with 5 degrees … 92% are connected by only four degrees,” Facebook said.