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.
