Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Facebook Cuts 6 Degrees Of Separation To 4.74

Six degrees of separation may be good enough for most people, but for Facebook members it’s only 4.74 degrees, according to a study conducted jointly by the social networking giant and the University of Milan. The study examined all 721 million active Facebook users, who had 69 billion friendships among them, Facebook said. The researchers approximated the number of hops between all pairs of individuals on Facebook using algorithms developed by the University of Milan’s Laboratory for Web algorithmics. They found that 99.6% of all pairs of users are connected by six hops – five degrees of separation – but 92% are connected by only five hops, which works out to four degrees of separation. That makes the average 4.74 hops, compared with the 5.28 hops recorded in 2008. The reason is the growth in Facebook membership worldwide, which ties together even more people. The researchers also found that a user’s friends are most likely to be in the same age group and come from the same country. Most pairs of people in any one country, the researchers found, are separated only by four hops – three degrees of separation.