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Facebook Knocks "Six Degrees of Separation" Down a Few Notches (i-programmer.info)
mikejuk writes: Six degrees of separation is the, already well established, idea that any individual is connected to any other via six network nodes. New research has discovered that the average between Facebook users is just three and a half: "We know that people are more connected today than ever before. Over the past five years, the global Facebook community has more than doubled in size. Today we're announcing that during that same time period, the degrees of separation between a typical pair of Facebook users has continued to decrease to 3.57 degrees, down from 3.74 degrees in 2011. This is a significant reflection of how closely connected the world has become." This may all be true and Facebook makes us better connected, but it leaves the question of the quality of the connections open. Are Facebook friends anything like real friends?
Somebody claims that an AVERAGE of 3.5 compared to an UPPER LIMIT of 6.0 is "new research" ?
How do I math ?
This adds only one degree of separation. The village shopkeeper has interactions with one or two highly connected merchants in the outside world. So by degree three your neighbourhood is already in the tens of thousands, even for "highly isolated" communities. By degree six or seven you are likely in the billions.