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.

Comments

its a scam

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:its a scam

[wiedzmin]

I know it sounds like trolling, but you may have a valid point - Facebook knows exactly who is connected and how - they should be easily able to pull a report and see if 6 degrees of separation is true (sure there may be privacy concerns, but they can just add that as an opt-out feature again, not a big deal). This seems like an elaborate/obscure marketing campaign in wake of Google+ :)

facebook yahoo data sync?

[AwesomeMcgee]

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.

Artificial Test in an Artificial World ...

[foobsr]

TFS: " each of whom have an average of 130 friends "

... where the validity of hitherto common concepts vanishes.

CC.

Sounds Great!

[jimmerz28]

Oh whoops while we were performing this test we accidentally shared a whole bunch of private information with our partners.

Paul Erdos

[Ecuador]

The editor should be banished from /. for mentioning the Bacon number and not the Erdos number.