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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.
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)
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
did facebook and yahoo ask permission of all these users before rifling through their profiles?
It's not a travelling salesman problem, it's a shortest path problem, and as such is much easier. For the distance between two specific people, you'd need the Dijkstra algorithm, and for the distance between any two people, you could use Floyd-Warshall. This one is in O(n^3), where n is the number of users; that's a big number, but it's nowhere near the (supposed) complexity of the TSP.
Real science is always scoffed at buy businessmen because it often gets in the way of profit. Profit is only generated by bullshitting people, and science is the act of making people see the facts. No businessman wants you to see the facts or even consider them.
Think about it. Someone buys something ridiculously cheap and resells it for insane profit. That's crazy! But it happens every day and even SCIENTISTS buy things at five times the standard material price, or more! Except of course, DIY people. These are the purist scientists who not only know how to put things together but they also know how to create things with their hands that are better than marketed versions of the product for a number of reasons.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
facebook "friend" doesn't mean the same as the usual word frield. It includes friends, family, acquaintances, and people who were friends a decade ago.
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.
How do you know for sure that your purchasing decisions are made by *intentional* perceptions of products, and not by the subtly controlled environment you subject yourself to when engaging in things like Facebook? Heck, by your own admission all I would have to do (as a marketer) is somehow dis-align my brand with Facebook and I will be excluded from your circle of distrust. After that it's only a matter of time before that distinction creeps into a purchase decision. People put so much more unconscious thought into purchases (and other things) than they tend to admit, and often its the ones going around saying "no that's not going to influence my purchases!" that are the most susceptible.
Get help before you end up like Kaczynski.
Yes, if you have 1,000,000 nodes and there are at least 499,994,500,020 edges out of a possible 499,999,500,000 (ie. a bit more than 99.999% of them), then yes you can conclude the diameter of the graph is no more than 6. But no, simply counting the number of edges is not particularly useful. You need to make further assumptions about the graph to get a useful bound.
This has been done before. There used to be a site called Six Degrees, which was a social network that showed your contacts at various distances.
Which was swallowed by Orkut. Which was swallowed by Google.
By the way, the original theory is that six degrees is the _maximum_ distance between any two living humans, not the average.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
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+ :)
Bow before me, for I am root.
Not really, no. It's about scale-free networks (Networks that have preferential attachment, IE, people with tons of friends are more likely to get new friends than people with no friends. Their degree distribution, IE, the number of friends, is power-law distributed as opposed to exponential distributions, which come from friendship being totally random). You can model social networks fairly well as scale-free networks empirically. Roughly speaking, the average distance between two random notes is proportional to the log of the log of the number of nodes.
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
Before I deleted my FB account a year or so ago, I had:
A kid I sat next to in study hall in my sophomore year of high school in the 90s.
A kid who ate at "my" lunch table in 8th grade in the 80s.
A girl from college who supposedly lived in my dorm in the 90s, although I don't remember her at all.
A salesguy from a satellite office who I met once at HQ back in 2002, but I couldn't not friend him without offending a real local friend
A recruiter who never got me a job, but I didn't want to offend her by defriending because someday, in the distant future, she might actually get me a job. Well, probably not, but its kind of like playing the lotto for free.
And finally I believe I had my wife's lifelong dentist friended. Don't remember for sure about that one.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
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.
The article mentions that messages will be sent to the friends. I suppose the theory is that a stranger will just ignore the request while someone with a true connection will participate. It is not just parsing the map of connections among facebookers.
If so, that's trivial to disprove. There are about 100 uncontacted tribes of humans in the world. Choose one. Find the shortest path to yourself. There is no path.
On the contrary. If you know the tribe exists, then somebody in the civilized world knows somebody in the tribe. The tribe contact likely knows everyone in the tribe. The civilized contact has a good chance of being a research scientist, and has a very large number of contacts. Since the civilized person to any tribe member is a maximum of 2 degrees, then the researched need only be connected to everyone else via 4 degrees, which may not be out of the realm of possibility given that most well-heeled researchers will have direct contacts in multiple, if not all, continents.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?