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."

Comments

Disagree

[Kazymyr]

Mine is infinity since I don't have a facebook account.

Re:Disagree

[Anonymous Coward]

You also don't know anyone with a Facebook account, and no one you know knows anyone with a Facebook account, and so on? I'm not sure you understand what they are talking about, you read "Facebook" and just wanted to tell people you don't use it.

Re:Disagree

[rapidreload]

Lemme guess, you don't have a TV either but want to tell the world regardless?

Re:Disagree

[fisted]

yeah, so antisocial not to hand over all data to facebook.

Re:Disagree

[similar_name]

I think it would be interesting to see the average degrees of separation for each individual. One person might have an average of 9 degrees separation to everyone else while another individual might average 3. Cross that number with standard demographics data and look at any correlations. x being people not on Facebook you could still compare people with 3 + x degrees vs 9 + x degrees.

Re:Disagree

[foobsr]

is the degree 0 or 1 between two people that know each other personally

The question might be whether the degree between you and yourself is infinity and only approaches 1 after an enormous amount of training. Just a thought.

The implication is that any small number whithin the context given is worth ... well.

CC.

Re:Disagree

[leuk_he]

More interesting, who is that 0.75 person. A dwarf, a invalid without legs? a hobbit?

Skewed Data?

[Sharkyfour]

Wouldn't this be skewed by all the people who befriend random strangers to increase the size of the Mafia's or farm friends?

Re:Skewed Data?

[meza]

Maybe I'm different from other Facebook users then, sure I have some people on my friends list that I only met once at a party and now don't even remember who they are. But in real life there are so many more people that I know casually and would say I'm "connected to" that I am not friends with on Facebook, such as: my hair dresser, my dentist, my boss, other colleagues, all the people I ever went to school with (of whom I've probably befriended less than 25% on Facebook) all the teachers I ever had, my neighbours, distant relatives, my siblings friends etc etc.

So I think if we included everyone we know in real life the degree of separation would probably go down, not up.

Re:Skewed Data?

[DavidTC]

Except that the idea of degrees of separation isn't 'friends', it's 'People who know each other'. No one ever said those people had to be 'friends'. No one's ever bothered to try to define exactly what that means, although at minimum you probably have to have exchanged words with them at some point, and have a way of contacting them.

Granted, on Facebook, it's probably slightly too loose even with that requirement. Apparently, some people on Facebook go around friending anyone who shows up as a likely friend, regardless of whether or not they actually know the person. And sometimes the other person accepts that request. Clicking on someone's picture and sending a request is probably not actually 'knowing' someone.

So assuming, on average, one of those bogus 'knowing people' per chain of '4.74' people, which caused the calculation to skip a number that really should be there (They aren't X's friend but they are the friend of the friend of X) ...it comes out to essentially what people have been saying all along.

Which is weird, because as far as I know, 'six degrees' isn't based on any scientific information...it's from playing a game with Kevin Bacon. (Which is not about who 'knows' each other, it's about who's been in movies and TV shows with each other.)

"Research" indeed

[Kittenman]

A good promo for Facebook ... gets it in the news without mentioning 'security' Dammit, I just did.

Re:"Research" indeed

[hellkyng]

Right! All this wasted research when anyone on 4chan could easily have told you how many friend requests it would take to find the neighbors hot daughter who just went off to college and joined a sorority...

So overall, it is 6...

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:So overall, it is 6...

[TexVex]

I understood that six degrees was supposed to be the maximum, not the average.

no it's not

[Anonymous Coward]

it is 4.74 + 1; think about it...

Re:no it's not

[Tomato42]

4.75 + 1 in my book is very close to the "old, frowned up, value" of six...

Re:no it's not

[jrumney]

There are whole villages across Asia, Africa and South America that do not have an internet connection. Are you sure everyone on Earth knows someone with a facebook account?

Interesting

[koan]

So if you're on Facebook you're only 4.74 degrees from some maniacal jihadist, right-wing Christian extremist or a pedobear...

Bad Claim

[Ibiwan]

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!

Cool

[Anonymous Coward]

I stopped using facebook way before it was cool to stop using it.

Re:Cool

[Ravon Rodriguez]

I use Facebook ironically.

Misrepresentation of the original research

[smellsofbikes]

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.

this just in

[geekoid]

average is less then the most.

Not exactly.

[raehl]

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.

Re:Not exactly.

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, that incredibly vague metric doesn't really explain what a degree of separation is.

Is it just people you personally know? Or does it count:
- people you've only met, even if you've forgotten them?
- people you work with?
- people you work in the same building as (regardless of whether you work for the same company)?
- people you work in the same company as (regardless of whether you've ever met them)?
- people you've done business with at some point (including the check-out clerk at a shop or their manager, whom you've never met)?
- people you've passed on the street?
- people you've ridden a bus with?
- neighbors, whether you've ever talked to them or not? (And in how large of a radius?)

So 6 degrees of ... whatever. You could say everyone shares only 1 degree since they've breathed the same atmosphere or you could massively increase the steps by making a "degree of separation" limited to parent-child genealogical links. It's all just lies, damn lies, and statistics anyway.