Facebook released some pioneering social-networking research last night on its blog — the kind that only a company with over 700 million active users and 60 billion connections could help produce — that looked at how closely we’re connected to those around us. The headline everyone pulled from the study was that the famous “six degrees of separation” originally described by psychologist Stanley Milgram in the 1960s has been reduced to less than five, or even four in some cases, on the giant social network. But has it really? What do we mean when we friend someone on Facebook, and how does that translate to the “real world”?
In the study, which Facebook did in collaboration with a number of researchers at the University of Milan in Italy, the network looked at the connections between all 721 million active Facebook users, or more than 10 percent of the world’s population — a staggering 69 billion “friendships.” As the company noted, this makes the research by far the largest social-networking study ever released. By contrast, Milgram’s famous experiment in 1967 (which he based on an idea described in a Hungarian short story from 1929) involved postcards sent by regular mail between just 296 volunteers.
Is Facebook making us more connected to each other?
According to the Facebook post, the number of “hops” or connections required to get from one person to another in virtually any location around the world (any location with Internet access and Facebook users, that is) was six, and more than 90 percent of users were actually connected by five hops — equivalent to four degrees of separation rather than Milgram’s six. And the number of hops has actually decreased over time: Facebook said the average distance was 5.28 in 2008 and it is now just 4.7.
*gigaom2.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/315054_10150417142478415_8394258414_8591456_1735119804_n.jpg?w=604&h=243
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