Slashdot Mirror
4.74 Degrees of Separation on Facebook
First time accepted submitter perryizgr8 writes "Facebook Data Team has taken all the friends data of everyone on Facebook and analyzed it, finding out the shortest distance between every two persons. They can now confidently say that the average degree of separation between any two humans is 4.74, not six as previously claimed by various entities."
Mine is infinity since I don't have a facebook account.
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet -Stanislaw Lem
Wouldn't this be skewed by all the people who befriend random strangers to increase the size of the Mafia's or farm friends?
sharkyfour.com
A good promo for Facebook ... gets it in the news without mentioning 'security' Dammit, I just did.
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
6 degrees of separation, not limited to any single medium
Just under 5 for any two facebook'ees
but to get to anyone not on facebook, you'd have to go one extra hop
I wanna know my link to Kevin Bacon. Do you think FB would tell all of us how we get back to him?
Unfortunately, for the most part we don't know the people on our Facebook accounts. I am a loser at the facebook game, I only add people I actually know, but still sometimes end up going 'who is that, why did I accept them?' Once you factor this into the argument, it's easy to see how the 6 degrees of seperation can be diluted down to 4.74, artificially through 'friends' that we don't even know of.
If you and X were tagged in a photo, but have no relationship outside of that specific encounter, was that brought into the equation? Like and subscribe aside, it appears they did not include other interactions that may not require friend associations. Did you both attended the same event? Commented on the same post?
A person that makes coffee.for me is 1 degree of separation but I don't call them my friend.
I'd be curious to know what the minimum number of connections necessary to link any two persons is, over the average.
GCS/MU/P d- s:- a-- C++++$ UL++ P+ L++ E+ W++ N o K- w--- O M+ V- PS+++ PE Y+ PGP t+ 5- X R++ tv+ b++ DI++ D++ G+ e++ h-
it is 4.74 + 1; think about it...
So if you're on Facebook you're only 4.74 degrees from some maniacal jihadist, right-wing Christian extremist or a pedobear...
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
1) As others have pointed out, not all humans are on Facebook. I'm sure the FB researchers would be hard-pressed to believe that, though.
More importantly,
2) The "six degrees" is supposed to be the MAXIMUM linkage between any two people -- not the average. Good job disproving something nobody ever claimed, guys!
--
So if someone can come up with just the right thing to trick everyone into clicking, malware is 5 hops from infecting all of Facebook?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15844230
I stopped using facebook way before it was cool to stop using it.
FB is the biased sub-sample of the human population. It's made mainly on young english speaking people living in rich countries. FB is banned in some coutries (like China). If those people joined FB, I'm sure the 4.74 figure would go up.
But anyway, it's still an interesting news.
If anyone wants to read a good analysis of the *original* six-degrees-of-separation study, Malcolm Gladwell wrote about it in The New Yorker about ten years ago. (You may wish to skip ahead to part 3.) The researchers -- and this was Stanley Milgram, of the infamous Milgram Experiment involving people's willingness to torture other people -- gave people envelopes addressed to a specific person, and told them to write their names on the envelopes then give them to someone they thought might know the addressee. When all the envelopes came through, they analyzed both the number of hops and the route. (The average was somewhere between 5 and 6 hops, with some being higher. There is no assurance this is the shortest route, but their initial estimates were 100 hops, not five.) The most interesting part was that of the envelopes that reached their destination, more than half came through just three people. It's the discussion of those people, the ones who know people in various different close-knit communities, that matters: they're the connection points.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
It feels quite good to have to degrees of separation from the average victim of this spy/gossip ring.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Mine is infinity since I don't have a facebook account.
Actually, it doesn't matter if you have a FB account or not. If any of your "friends" ever uploaded their address book to FB, then FB knows your email address and can calculate the degree of separation between your email address and any other email address (again FB user or not).
Pause and think about this.
The “six degrees” concept dates to a 1929 short story, “Chains,” in which Frigyes Karinthy, the Hungarian author, suggested that no one is more than a string of six friends away from any other person.
Six isn't the average, it's the maximum. I'd be more interested to know the 95% upper limit. The median would also be interesting, as that's how far you are away from 50% of the internet connected world (roughly). I'm not quite sure what the mean really means in this situation, as the distribution is likely skewed toward people that barely use Facebook, thus a higher distance from everyone.
average is less then the most.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
1.26 degrees less separation for sheeple.
Or met at least once?
From the linked article: "Somewhat surprisingly, even for individuals aged 60, the distribution of their friends’ ages is sharply peaked at exactly 60." Really bad explanation of the accompanying graph. The distribution for people aged 60 is wildly different than the distribution for age 20. And it's unsurprising that people have friends of the same age.
What do you mean? African or European degrees?
If you were having a party or getting married you would invite your friends, 99% of the "Friends" on facebook wouldn't get an invite.
"degree of separation between any two humans is 4.74"
Are they counting company-run facebook pages?
And how are they taking into account the infinite degree of separation between two humans not on facebook? One might think that would screw up the average by a little bit eh?
Isn't this skewed by celebrity facebook pages? Any people that 'friends' with say Michael Jackson is only 2 degrees removed between themselves!
What I'd like to know is: "are there islands", i.e. groups of people completely unrelated to other groups? And if there is no such island, what is the max distance between any two people?
If you were having a party or getting married you would invite your friends, 99% of the "Friends" on facebook wouldn't get an invite.
Not intentionally, at least. :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Four people and a midget!
I did an analysis of me, my Facebook friends, and my Facebook friends' Facebook friends who are Facebook friends with more than one of my Facebook friends.
The result is a pretty graphic.
Yeah, well, what if you don't have an email address?
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
If there was a security setting to expose your account to friends of friends of friends of friends, would that include everyone?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
"They can now confidently say that the average degree of separation between any two humans is 4.74, not six as previously claimed by various entities."
Wrong.
They can confidently say that the average degree of separation between any two humans on facebook is 4.74.
Not only that, but "various entities" never claimed that the value was six for facebook account holders, they claimed 6 degrees of separation between all people.
The authors incorrectly assumed that every human has a facebook account.
The old value is that no person is more than 6 degrees of separation from ANY OTHER PERSON, period. So, randomly pick any person on the planet, and you should be able to get to that person with no more than 5 intervening people.
An *AVERAGE* of 4.74 doesn't say anything about a 6-person maximum.
paintball
Yeah, well, what if you don't have an email address?
Perhaps closer to reality, what if you don't have any friends?
that me and obama are just 4.74 friends apart...
are honestly so fucking annoying. This was an interesting article, but it mentioned facebook so you just have to try and pull it apart, and most of you are doing a shitty job at it. The editors need some fucking codeword for facebook to keep the comments tame.
If that's how they did it, then they did it wrong
If I have info@some-online-store.com in my address book to stop it going to spam, and do do all their customers that doesn't count as a degree of separation.
I'm pretty sure you're not supposed to include commercial entities.
I know this company called microsoft, do you know of it too? Do most people in the world know of it? Awesome, there are now 2 degrees of separation worldwide.
There is only 1 degree in USA because every citizen knows obama is the president.
It doesn't work that way, there needs to be a circular link somewhere in the chain, you don't get that from someones address book referencing and email you don't also have an address book for.
If Obama knew all the heads of state, and they in turn knew all people in their states, then there would be 2 degrees of separation. That's not the case though.
NO.
The problem is that people who used to be related in 2nd degree are in an environment (Facebook) where they are much *MUCH* more likely to then be linked in the 1st degree. And so on.
In fact, FB itself puts pressure to narrow the degrees of separation of every active member.
So, NO, this data mining mission means nothing about how people are really connected outside of FB.
google kevin bacon facebook
1.Kevin Bacon * | Facebook
Personal Information: Disclaimer: This page is not created by the "real"
Kevin
Bacon but is meant as a tribute to him and his work. | Facebook.
www.facebook.com/pages/Kevin-Bacon-/59999919189 - Cached - Similar
D'OH, looks like the facebook degrees of separation to the real Kevin
Bacon is actually infinite.
FBEngineer1 "Hey guys, I just ran Dijkstra on Kevin Bacon and it says
the degree of separation is oo"
FBEngineer2 "Whoa, what's that number 8 doing lying down on its side
like that? Hey FBEngineer3, FBEngineer1 says there's 8
links to Kevin Bacon."
FBEngineer3 "That can't be right. Did he count the inlinks and the
outlinks together or what? He has to divide by two! Hey, FB
Engineer4, there's 4 degs of separation between people on facebook!"
FBEngineer4 "What'd you say? Only 4? Did you add a safety margin?
Let's make it 4.74 just in case Zuck gets involved. That's better,
it's ready to publish on the web!"
You also don't know anyone with a Facebook account, and no one you know knows anyone with a Facebook account, and so on?
The metric covers only Facebook, just as the Erdo"s metric covers only coauthorship of articles in scholarly journals and the Bacon metric covers only publicly exhibited feature films. I am meatspace friends with a lot of people who have Facebook accounts, yet because I don't have one myself, I am outside the metric's domain.
you read "Facebook" and just wanted to tell people you don't use it.
Facebook launched after I had already got a degree and lost access to my @*.edu. That's the excuse I've tended to give.
I have my own domain, which means I control every possible address at that domain. However, that domain happens not to be in .edu and was therefore ineligible for the first two and a half years of Facebook, just as Google Apps domains were initially ineligible for Google+.
According to Facebook, you do not exist.
All the world's a CPU, and all the men and women merely AI agents
People like to point out that there are people who are gateways. I guess this is someone who knows a lot of people, but maybe not well. I guess someone like a food vendor or clergy falls into this category.
If you know that someone lives in Kirbardi, you want first to get your letter to someone traveling, who is probably going to find someone else traveling to that part of the world. This really means that some tried to superficially fulfil the requirements of the challenge, which might not be a factor if trying to do this in a natural fashion.
If the USA has ~60 Fusion centres and a few ~100 trained IT cyber staff per centre, how many long term top quality "10 separate identities" can they deploy?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-operation-social-networks
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9218177/Google_vs._Facebook_by_the_numbers
Say 150 million as a round max US user count with some very basic web 2.0 usage.
Add in airforce, NSA (and friends) via cyber efforts - 10 to x0 sites/bases, a few 100 staff/contractors with the same "10 separate identities"?
How many fake identities for 150 million US users?
Does the math get near the magic 2.5% of East Germany's Stasi ratio to "user" population?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Kevin bacon game evovled from a 1967 study and the subsequent movie which was made in the 90s.
oh wait you cant because new york times gives a pay cookie. but when i removed the cookie then i could at least rtfa.
-
... because I have been told many times that I am the only person in the world who is not on facebook. Therefore you must be on facebook.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
If Obama knew all the heads of state, and they in turn knew all people in their states, then there would be 2 degrees of separation. That's not the case though.
It depends how you define "acquaintance". Does you knowing someone counts, even if they don't know you personally? I think a realistic definition is "someone who you can get to relay information for you". For example, I can go meet my elected representative and ask him to pass a message to the Prime Minister, who can then relay that message to Obama. So in that respect, my degree of separation to Obama is only 2.
Dropbox drops it like it's hot.
Take a jungle river in some remote part of the world and it would probably be at least 5 degrees just to get to the guy at the mouth of the river. Then another for a well connected trader(6). Then he deals with some river side guy(7) who treks deep into the jungle to a remote village that has a guy (8) who knows of an even more remote village(9) that otherwise runs from all outside contact.
Think of those people videod last year firing arrows at the helicopter flying over their village. My guess is that they haven't met anyone who met anyone who uses facebook.
Unless you count the missionaries they ate last week.
"Remember kids, strangers are just friends you haven't met yet...heyukyukyuk".
There might be some truth to that, philosophically speaking.
You know, trees falling in forests, etc.
How much is the result skewed because of celebrities with tens or hundreds of thousands of "friends"?
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
It is for social wankers. 4.7 or 6? Okay, Kang Soo-kyung, political prisoner for the last 40 years in isolation in North Korea. Connect!
Okay, Yenplu Onyango or rather that would have been her name is she lived out today but she like many kids die each day in Afrtica. Connect!
It is just the modern version of "in a past life I was King of Sheba". Note how nobody ever was a nobody in a past life like they are in their current life.
Or those ancestor tracking things. Yes, everyone in Europe is a descendant of one king. Big deal, we are also a decendant of the whores he shagged. But that is not mentioned. EVER. Would ruin the moment.
One time I was forced to sit through such a session of seperation. Yes, I knew a guy who once talked to Obama. Big whoop. Hell I am a nobel myself AND distant relatives run a country. Still am a nobody who doesn't know anybody. And so are you. Happy dreams.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
This is none sense, since it is not between any two humans, but any two facebook accounts. There is a world of difference between the two.
Not all humans have a facebook account, and not all facebook accounts correspond to one human.
That is the first thing I thought. It is like saying of the set of people I personally know, there is at most one degree of separation between any two people.
Yeah and who do you "know"? How about the girl in the grocery shop that helped you last week? How about the classmate from kindergarten that you have in a picture, but you don't remember his name? How about that famous writer that signed his book for you standing in line at the bookshop, even shaking your hand?
...I made three days ago a submission with the correct number (3.74). /. couldn't care less.
On average the degrees are 3.74, and this is why our paper is called "Four degrees of separation". 4.74 is the distance, which is one more than the degrees of separation. Unfortunately sociologists decided to count the "intermediaries" (so if we are friends, our degree of separation is zero), whereas computer scientists count "hops" (so if we are friends, our distance is one). This generated a lot of confusion. But, just to be clear, no, we did not round 4.74 down to 4; we rounded 3.74 up to 4. :)
You also don't know anyone with a Facebook account, and no one you know knows anyone with a Facebook account, and so on?
The metric covers only Facebook, just as the Erdo"s metric covers only coauthorship of articles in scholarly journals and the Bacon metric covers only publicly exhibited feature films.
There should be a considerable bias in the estimate of an average degree of separation of 4.74. The people not on facebook are more loosely connected than those on facebook, so the average would increase. Also, the average used to be higher (in previous estimates on facebook), suggesting that the networking of existing people on facebook gets denser over time (you add/get to know friends of friends), while the overall number of people on facebook doesn't grow as fast anymore as it used to.
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
Being 0 the distance between you and yourself, the shortest distance is 1: you and your friends, the interesting thing should be the longest distance, not the average, anyway seems interesting
This data can never really show anything meaningful. Some (many ?) people add every-one they have had more than a days interaction with. I know people with 1000s of "friends", and they don't really know why they are "friends" with many of these people.
I know some-one who created a completely fictitious "character" who now has over 500 friends, and the "character" gets about 20 friend request a week. There is obviously no limit to how shallow some facebook users are....
At least once a year one should have to confirm ones friends, having to click 1000s of confirm buttons down an endless list would clean things up a bit.
The original 6 was for the whole world.
Only a subset of all humans belong to Facebook, and they tend to be related to other people that use facebook, because others join facebook since they know the person is on there to start with. Which is why they join. Many are relatives of the person so bound to be related by definition. Still, the info is of some merit.
Yeah, there's a number of granfalloon accounts too where people have hundreds of thousands of friends. These will strongly lower the averages.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
...since everybody is friend with Tom.
Just the fact that people add random strangers when they get friend requests invalidates their data.
First , the "shortest distance" parameter is NOT the same as: "the average distance" ..
Secondly, the article self-selects people who are in the 'social net world', a population that one would logically assume to be more prone to making themselves known to others.
Thirdly, per "secondly" above, it is incorrect to state that the "6 degrees" is incorrect.
Fourthly: im trying to think how this article is useful in any way ... other than confirming that 'FB' types
tend to be , shall we say, 'generous' with the extent they are willing to dive into the FB world.. a point
we all know was true before this fauxtical (1) was proposed.
Footnotes:
"fauxtical" : a false or misleading 'article'
And this is why friends who might not take care of my email address get the email address that's used as the spambucket.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Does you knowing someone counts, even if they don't know you personally?
Knowing? Hell, on FB they're called "friends"!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I mean, I only know 4 people in real life, so I searched for a website that put all mafia playing members in one spot. Now I have over 80k friends. I'm sooooooooo happy.
I seriously doubt the original study's figure was 6.00
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it