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Facebook Eroding 'Six Degrees Of Separation'

  • PC World, Tuesday, November 22, 2011 11:48 AM

Has Facebook, with its great size and social greasing, shattered the old "Six Degrees of Separation" theory? Citing a joint study, Facebook indeed claims to have brought people (only those with Web connections, we assume) just 4.74 steps away from meeting any other Web-connected person in the world.

In what reads like a marketing release for mathletes, Facebook says it paired with the University of Milan to approximate the "number of hops," or degrees of separation, between all pairs of individuals on Facebook. “The study found that while 99.6 percent of all pairs of people on Facebook are connected by five degrees of separation (six hops), 92 percent are connected by only four degrees (five hops),” PCWorld notes. According to Facebook, the average distance in 2008 was 5.28 hops.

In addition, the study also found that people are much more closely connected to individuals in their own country. (In any single country most people are connected by only three degrees, or four hops.) “Facebook naturally attributes some of this closeness to Facebook itself, as well as social networks in general, PCWorld writes.

 

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