Six Degrees of Separation? Facebook Finds a Smaller Number

According to facebook, the six degrees of separation has now been reduced to mere 3.5 degrees.

After studying 1.59 billion people active on the social networking website, the team determined that the number is actually 3.57 – meaning thereby that there is actually “three-and-a-half degrees of separation” where each person in the world is connected to every other person by an average of three-and-a-half other people.

Consider that not so long ago, conventional wisdom had it that every person on the planet were separated by six degrees.

You can also read Facebooks blog post, which explains the findings in full.

Mark Zuckerberg has some grand goals for Facebook in the future: by 2030, the CEO of the world’s largest social network wants five billion users on his service, a significant increase on its current user base.

“We want to finish connecting everyone, we’re going to do it in partnership with governments and different companies all over the world”, Zuckerberg said.

I asked friends and colleagues for their own numbers.

Keep those degrees of separation high, I say. Although people with more Facebook friends tended to have a lower degrees-of-separation number, that wasn’t always the case.

According to researchers, our collective “degrees of separation” have shrunk over the previous 5 years.

We’re only two hops away and the number is already big.

First off, this study, like others, is stuck with the fact that while not all friendships are of equal value, Facebook’s friend-or-not default options don’t reflect those subtleties. Well, it seems like Facebook is doing its bit of reminding you how precious relationships are.

“Now, with twice as many people using the site, we’ve grown more interconnected, thus shortening the distance between any two people in the world”, said Facebook.

Has the internet brought us closer together, or pushed us futher apart?

Happy Lunar New Year from Priscilla, Max and me!