Slashdot Mirror
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?
Great. So now everyone is less than four unknown friendings away from everyone else. We're now more connected with random people we don't know than ever!
Yes and naturally the NSA will consider that a justification to listen to all your calls and read all your e-mails.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Everybody on Facebook knows this. And because of this we've got way too many friends on Facebook, at least compared to the real work. That in turn means we seem more connected, making the degree of separation in the graph go down. But none of that is real; if you'd only count your actual friends on Facebook, the degree of separation would be much higher, because we'd have a lot less friends per person.
Somebody claims that an AVERAGE of 3.5 compared to an UPPER LIMIT of 6.0 is "new research" ?
How do I math ?