"When considering even the most distant Facebook user in the Siberian tundra or the Peruvian rainforest, a friend of your friend probably knows a friend of their friend," wrote the Facebook data team in a blog post explaining its research. So if you take two people within a country, there’s likely to be only three degrees of separation between them. Also interesting: Only half of Facebook users have more than 100 friends. "At first glance, the median friend count on Facebook — 100 — may seem surprisingly low; a quick survey of my own friends reveals that they almost all have more than 100 friends," the team wrote.
The information comes from research Facebook released late Monday evening on 721 million active-Facebook users and their 69 billion connections, done in collaboration with Università degli Studi di Milano.--On Facebook, it seems that just about everyone is a friend of a friend somewhere down the line. A new study from the social network and its data team has found that 99.6 percent of all people on the social network can be connected within five steps, or six relationships. According to the company’s data team, in 2008 the average amount of separation between any two given people on the network was 5.28 steps. That trend also holds true for older Facebook users.
The social network says is has a sample size of 721 million people, or a little over 0ne-tenth of the estimated world 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 new research used a slightly bigger cohort: 721 million Facebook users, more than one-tenth of the world’s population. The findings were posted on Facebook’s site Monday night. 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.
“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. Though the study was by far the largest of its kind, it raised questions about definitions of terms like “friend” on Facebook. A 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. “It’s the weak ties that make the world small.”
“News spreads well on weak ties. “It’s more evidence that they’ve been enormously successful at connecting a large number of people very well,” he said. The research underscores the growing power of the emerging science of social networks, in which scientists study the ways people interact by crunching gigantic sets of Internet data. “These social network tools provide individuals with tremendous reach,” said Dr.--Horvitz, the Microsoft researcher. The Facebook paper, titled “Four Degrees of Separation,” notes that Milgram posed both an optimistic interpretation of his findings and a pessimistic one.
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