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Yahoo, Facebook Test "Six Degrees of Separation"
An anonymous reader writes "Yahoo has partnered with Facebook to test the iconic social experiment known as 'six degrees of separation' (everyone is on average approximately six steps away from any other person on Earth). The goal of the Small World Experiment is to determine the social path length between two strangers by tapping into the world's largest social network and its 750 million users, each of whom have an average of 130 friends." Looks like a fun project, but not quite as useful as knowing how close you are to Kevin Bacon.
neither of these two do anything except for cash...guess now what they do with such knowledge.
AND WHY are i not being paid to do this?
So does this mean that even though I have explicitly not given my yahoo account to my facebook account, they're about to sync with eachother anyway? Great.
TFS: " each of whom have an average of 130 friends "
... where the validity of hitherto common concepts vanishes.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
How do they determine real connections vs just having browsed some random strangers' cute/funny/whatever profile and saving it just for that? I'm pretty sure the original theorist would scoff at the notion that's a real social connection. LinkedIn would be much better but even then you'd have to filter out all the recruiters.
Oh whoops while we were performing this test we accidentally shared a whole bunch of private information with our partners.
The editor should be banished from /. for mentioning the Bacon number and not the Erdos number.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
I wonder how they get around computational complexity of this kind of thing. I bet it doesn't try to find the smallest number of degrees of sepperation. Or since it is between you and a stranger it just does a random walk and returns who ever is at the 6th position who isn't in either of your fiiends list. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem
Facebook doesn't know anything about me. I have subscribed there and posted there for a long time.
They sell the information they have collected on me to other companies and they make a tidy profit for it, but the funny thing is that what they are selling has nothing to do with me. It won't help someone market better to me. It won't help someone convince me to buy something.
The reason this kind of thing doesn't work is pretty easy. I'm the kind of person that makes purchasing decisions based on the actual products or services and my perception of them, along with my decision of whether to trust them. Anyone working with Facebook I automatically distrust. I never trusted Yahoo to begin with, especially when they had the overgrown mess of a website back when Google was starting its journey.
So it really doesn't surprise me that Facebook has partnered with Yahoo, but to be honest I couldn't give a shit about it.
This is just ivy league idiots passing money around. There is nothing more going on here.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
My friend and I used to play this "connections" game, mostly with movie stars, and always with funny variations like "Connect Tim Burton to Orson Welles, using the movie The Cannonball Run." We almost never needed six degrees to make even the most obscure connections. My favorite example was one we did when Rob Morrow played John Wilkes Booth in a miniseries: "Connect Rob Morrow to John Wilkes Booth." Seems hard no? Not really:
John Wilkes Booth's brother Junius was married to Agnes Booth, who was in the Palmer Theatre Company with Maurice Barrymore, who was the g-grandfather of Drew Barrymore, who starred with Ben Stiller in Duplex, who was on The Ben Stiller Show with Rob Morrow.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Do normal people really have 130 friends?
I don't use facebook, don't even have an account, but just counting the people I'd call friends i can think of 15, maybe 20 depending on how you count. If you want to count acquaintances I probably get to 250, but *friends*? I'd say 15.
I guess the facebook generation is a lot more social.
I always thought that this was a result which was known through graph theory of what happens when you get a large number of nodes each with an arbitrary number of unique connections between them, that it would always tend towards the case that you got an average of no more than six degrees of separation for a sufficiently large network. You wouldn't need to test the theory by experiment since it could be demonstrated mathemetically.
Having said that, supposed you had 100bn people in the world. You'd have to each have an awful lot of friends for it to be applicable then, ergo the same might be true of the much small number on Facebook. Maybe I shouldn't post comments when I don't know what I'm talking about.
In real life as soon as you know a person who has met the Queen or the Pope, you then know a lot of people via them. How strong does this connection need to be?
did facebook and yahoo ask permission of all these users before rifling through their profiles?
This makes migrants key gateway persons. Say you are originally from Iran and live in the USA, but have facebook friends in both countries, you are the gateway between the USA and Iran. A somewhat important thing, since most
migrants are often deemed "not that important" which affects their social and economic status. Finding key gateway persons can lead knowledge of a diaspora and can bring people together, like the 6 degrees. These key gateways are often highly vulnerable to outside factors once identified. I do hope nothing bad comes from this.
I think these new technologies will never succeed... I will wait till it is stable and secure, yeah that's the ticket.
Using Facebook to test this theory seems kind of dumb. I'm Facebook friends with the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, so it would appear that there is one degree of separation between me and his All Holiness. And because Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew is acquainted with Pope Benedict XVI, then there are only two degrees of separation between me and the Pope -- or between me and any number of world leaders or other important people. But, of course, I have never met the Ecumenical Patriarch, so you can't really consider that much of a connection.
Proverbs 21:19
That's exactly the original purpose of Orkut, the (almost defunct) original Google social network site. Orkut Buyukkokten (the Google employee that came with the idea on his 20% paid "free time") was the "Kevin Bacon" and the breadcrumbs of the site used to show the smallest paths between you and Orkut.
It was a fun experiment in the beginning because not only the path between you and Orkut was drawn, but the path between you and anyone you looked at the profile.
But then, when the first batch of geeks (who else, considering Orkut invited his geek friends of Stanford and Google first) started inviting the first batches of "civilians", in a couple of generations the experiment was not viable anymore because of the sheer amount of processing power needed to calculate the paths, the expansion of the network and the commercialization of the content.
Fun days were those when a social network by geeks, for geeks thrived (with lasers!).
I'm only 3 away from Kevin Bacon so that's me sorted.
http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=23688563&authType=NAME_SEARCH&authToken=29hl&locale=en_US&srchid=729a0167-726c-4e9f-8a3c-bb1c3402b7f0-0&srchindex=8&srchtotal=311&goback=.fps_PBCK_kevin+bacon_*1_*1_*1_*1_*1_*1_*2_*1_Y_*1_*1_*1_false_1_R_true_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2&pvs=ps&trk=pp_profile_name_link
I understand your idea, but it mistakes meeting someone with knowing them. Just like Facebook males the mistake of calling people "friends" just because they have something (imaginary or real) in common. While you might think you "know" the queen, just because you've met her there's no reciprocity in the relationship - she does not know you. So the premise falls down.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
The flaw is, of course, that people *not* on facebook probably have a systematically higher degree of separation, so the test systematically produces numbers that are too small.
(potential employer, after reviewing the social "map" of said candidate and seeing they're only 2 "degrees" away from a convicted sex molester...) "Well, we would like to hire you, but it seems that after further review, we don't feel you're quite a solid fit for the position."
Yeah, tell me that kind of abuse ain't gonna start happening...
I thought that the 6-degrees was a MAXIMUM, not an "average" as the article suggests. if we step it back to an "average" value then it isn't really very impressive.
further, maybe they should employ someone with a brain (you know, those people you pay as little as possible) to do the actual webcrawl + math to determine this more thoroughly than having laymen guess at paths to random people...
I haven't seen anybody link to this site yet. To see who is the center of the hollywood universe:
http://oracleofbacon.org/center_list.php
Atlas Shrugged : Thematic Story
I guess I'm 2 steps from Kevin Bacon; I fixed his dad's VCR while working at a shop in Ardmore, PA, back in '91. (it was more interesting however that on the same job, I met Patti LaBelle, and talked to her in her own house - very nice woman)
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
Everyone here is bitching about privacy breach, algorithm complexity etc. Actually it has nothing to do with this experiment. From TFA
"Anyone with a Facebook account can participate to verify if everyone is on average approximately six steps away from any other person on Earth. You’ll be asked to select one of your Facebook friends whom you believe is most likely to know the “target person” that has been assigned to you. A message will then be sent from friend to friend until you get it to the “target person.” The goal is to do this in as few steps as possible. "
Basically they are just repeating the old mail experiment, but with a new way of passing messages
- unless you (or one of your friends) participates nothing happens to your privacy
- no computer algorithm is involved
- no problem with celebrity profiles linking thousands of people that now nothing about each other
I took a Data Structures class this summer and we solved a similar homework problem to this using Djikstra's and min heaps. Of course, this is a pretty irrelevant question since your Facebook friends are just any random yahoo you clicked "Confirm" with.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
not less than 5 people in order to push Berlusconi away from me?
I need a longer, much longer separation from him as I have two teen daughters.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
I think this's a typo. It'd read "sex". Connection of sex sounds much better.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
I actually signed up for it because I'm like that and it turns out you have to provide the information you want to share and you have to send a message to a Facebook friend you think might get you closer to the end target. You do have to let the Yahoo app have access to your basic information on Facebook to sign up for it. If you want to be a target you have to let the app have more access to your information and provide some additional details. So basically, I doubt this will go anywhere specifically because it's not automatic or in the background. It takes actual intentional steps on the part of the participants.
No, the real challenge is getting a particularly low (or particulary high, but defined) Erdos-Bacon number.
No separation = same movie.
One degree was with someone who acted with him, etc.
I supposed IMDB could be topologized to measure two actors' separation.
Remember sixdegrees.com? It was one of the first chatrooms and was kinda based on the 6d separation idea.
They tell you whether you have any connections in common up to a certain degree.
Someone should analyze the graph and find the two people to introduce who will reduce the average path length of everyone else by the greatest amount...
And then kill one of them, to preserve the Bacon Throne.
Problem here is that actors, singers, companies, etc, will act as "hubs" - since they have hundreds of thousands of "friends". So probably it's not 6 degrees but 3 or 4 here.
Since Godwin's law will not be contradicted, I have to say that Wikipedia has proved rather successfully that you are never more than 4 clicks away from Hitler.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Does anyone else remember them? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SixDegrees.com
OT I know, but this is the same guy who did this http://cnr.berkeley.edu/ucce50/ag-labor/7article/article35.htm which together with the Stanford Prison experiment http://www.prisonexp.org/ shed some light on the darker side of human tendencies.
This is how it works.
Suppose everyone knows roughly 50 other people. If you add together your family (all of them - even distant cousins), the people you know at work, church, through your hobbies, your neighbors, your mailman and so on... the total is around 50.
Every one of these 50 people knows 50 *other* people, and every one of those 2500 people again knows 50 *other* people, so that the circle expands exponentially in powers of 50.
Of course, this isn't a complete description since at every stage there is an increasing probability that people in the next stage are already accounted for in an earlier stage, but this is the essential flavor.
The world population is 6.7 billion. The 6th root of that number is about 44. So discounting the probability of overlap as mentioned, everyone would only need to know 44 people to link everyone in the world to within 6 "degrees of Kevin Bacon".
I always thought that the *maximum* was six degrees of separation between virtually everyone. Thus, an average would lower than six degrees...and any instances of more than six degrees would be in the minority, or outliers that may simply be because not everyone is accounted for.
Of course, this also depends on what your criteria for each degree of separation. Do you have to be just facebook friends, or should you actually have had some real physical contact (i.e., being the same room together), or verbal exchange with someone, or should there actually be a meaningful relationship that associates two people along each degree of separation? We've already seen articles in /. which that demonstrated that many people add friends to their lists without really knowing who they are or ever even interacting with them. To me, that doesn't count. Also...what about famous/popular people who have 'friends' that are really just 'fans'...does that get counted?
Using the methodology described, it's up to each person to decide who out of their list of friends is the next link is to a given 'target'...but that doesn't confirm that their association with the selected 'friend' is actually a valid social linkage (e.g., someone may pick the next linkage based on popularity, but without actually having any social ties with that person). You can make some assumptions to overcome this, and the results will be interesting...but I don't think this will be conclusive if conducted in the manner described.
You’ll be asked to select one of your Facebook friends whom you believe is most likely to know the “target person” that has been assigned to you. A message will then be sent from friend to friend until you get it to the “target person.” The goal is to do this in as few steps as possible.
One of the crucial points of the Small World thing is that you can't predict your indirect acquaintances (or even the regions/groups they are in) more than one or at most two degrees away. We don't have some kind of global routing table in our head. I have dozens of friends in the US. It's quite possible that one of them is related to a former classmate of a relative of a former colleague of someone who knows Obama. Even assuming this is the case, I have no way of guessing who that would be.
Instead of relying on people's random guesses, it would be far more sound to throw computing power at the problem. The pass-the-parcel experiment is traditionally used because this is not possible in practice. If only Yahoo had a lot of computers dedicated to analyzing link networks and Facebook had a huge database of interpersonal relationships...
First off, the entire notion of "six degrees of separation" is based on a study that was later partially discredited. Milgram's study was flawed in a number of ways, later described by Judith Kleinfeld and others.
Secondly, even assuming that the "six degrees" effect was accurate, using facebook is not the same as the initial experiment at all. Facebook is a radically different method of connecting people.
It's interesting that Duncan Watts is mentioned in the article but that he isn't allowed to actually expound on any of these issues. I mean, it isn't like he wrote a book on this topic or anything.
This is pop culture science posing as something else entirely.
sig not found
The study would be worthless. A large percentage of the "friendships" on Facebook are based on common game play.
This is so retarded, most of anyone's friends on facebook are NOT friends in real life, assuming most slashdotters still know what real life is?
I checked the site, and it seems that, if you participate, they give you a "target" person, and you forward a message for the target to every one of your friends. And then *they* forward that to *their* friends, until it eventually gets to the target.
What I don't get is: why do they depend upon us unreliable humans forwarding all of this crap? Why can't Facebook just analyse everybody's friend list?
The study is being done only using people who are into social networking. There are several categories of isolating factors that doesn't control for properly.
You also need to include in your study, in proportional quantities to the whole world's population, people who think Facebook is stupid, not to mention people who don't have access to the internet, people who live in remote rural areas and have never traveled more than a few miles from home, and people who speak only one language and it's *not* a major lingua franca like English.
Selecting your sample population in a way that inherently excludes these groups of people guarantees that your results will be a severe misrepresentation of the average case.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
I was in high school plays with a young woman who went on to do well on Broadway. She's been nominated for a Tony. Veanne Cox now has like 40+ credits on IMDB.
Veanne was the hardest working person I knew. She was taking 2 different forms of dance while she was in High School, ballet before school, jazz dance after school and show practices.
Where do underground terrorist fit in, and all those technophobes that live in caves and where aluminum foil in their baseball caps?
I once sat in a chair previously owned by Agnes Moorhead. Does that put me two seats from Sabrina the teenage witch?
They've been saying 6 degrees of seperation since the earth had 5bill people (probably before that). Surely with 2 billion more people on the planet now it has to eventually go up to 7 degrees (although, I know it will be exponential how population would need to go up per degree).
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
The elephant in the room here is how connected people are sexually.
... so does that make it infinity?
In other words, how many shaggings are we away from Paris Hilton?
Oh, hang on, we are geeks here
I am sure everyone in world is six steps away from knowing some named Kevin (or some language variant of that name meaning "handsome" or "beloved") that eats Bacon or something that fits the definition of Bacon except from another animal.
Is that close?
Dude, just because the tribe is not in contact with people from our "modern" world, they are most certainly in contact with people from other tribes and they in turn are in contact with other tribes. If not, then inbreeding would have finished them off. So the tribes are connected and at some point there is a link between tribal peoples and non-tribal folks. So when you say "there is no path" I believe you are incorrect. It's probably more than 6 degrees, but there is likely to be a path.
So I've found that I'm within six steps of Kevin Spacey. Either exactly six if you keep it to working relationships, or 4 if you allow through a friends friend. It's apparently inescapable.
TFS: " each of whom have an average of 130 friends...
CC.
Actually, 130 is just right.
Dunbar's Number: Dunbar's number is suggested to be a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person.[1] Proponents assert that numbers larger than this generally require more restrictive rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable, cohesive group. No precise value has been proposed for Dunbar's number. It has been proposed to lie between 100 and 230, with a commonly used value of 150.
Between one dollar in the bank, and a million.
If you divide a million dollars repeatedly into groups of ten, it takes just six steps to reach any particular greenback (or loonie, if you're in Canada, etc).
Just a little perspective on this degrees of separation thing ... :)
I don't actually have a Facebook account, but by what I've seen a lot of people have less than a passing acquaintance with several of their Facebook friends. This can't really prove the "six degrees of separation" theory true.
I actually signed up to tell you that I am sick of people "actually signing up" to talk about trivial things.
Some apps are WYSIWYG. Some others are WYSIWTF.