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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."
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
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.
it is 4.74 + 1; think about it...
Lemme guess, you don't have a TV either but want to tell the world regardless?
To all newcomers - people here are very close-minded and can't handle complaints about Linux. Keep this in mind.
I stopped using facebook way before it was cool to stop using it.
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.
average is less then the most.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
yeah, so antisocial not to hand over all data to facebook.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
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.