Facebook – Anyone is Only 3.74 ‘people’ away!

Posted by aPOorV on Nov 24, 2011 in News Articles, Social Media | 1 comment

If we were to pick any random person on the social media giant Facebook, how many people would we need to go through to find a link to them?

According to a new study, on an average there are only 3.74 degrees of separation between any two Facebook users. For those who do not know, number of degrees is the number of people in the friendship chain between two people. The study was carried out in May with the help of Facebook’s data scientist Lars Backstrom and researchers from the University Of Milan. It involved 721 million active Facebook subscribers at that time. A number which is close to 10% of the world’s total population. However Facebook ‘pages’ and ‘subscriptions’ were not taken into account during the test. The users had approximately 69 billion friendships amongst them, which provided an enormous data sample to successfully carry out the study to a level of accuracy which was previously impossible. The number crunching was done on a 24-core computer with hard disk of only 1TB, a configuration which would not cost more than a few thousand pounds.

Though the success of the experiment is unprecedented, the idea behind it has existed since as long as 1929, when Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy suggested that there are only 6 degrees of separation between any two people in the world. The theory was popularised when it appeared in a play, a movie and even in a Trivia Game, where people would try to link actor Kevin Bacon to another celebrity within 6 steps.

Another attempt was made in the 60’s by psychologist Stanley Milgram. The experiment required people to deliver a letter to a person whom they did not know personally. The letters though, had to be passed on through a channel of their own acquaintances.

The problem with earlier tests was that they involved only a very limited number of study objects and there was no way to ascertain that the route taken by them to reach the desired person was the most direct.

On an average, a Facebook user has around 100 friends. Even though this may seem far less than expected, results showed that 99.6% of the time, any two random users had only 5 degrees of separation, while 92% were distanced by 4 degrees. The final result thus came out to be around 3.74 degrees.

A similar test on facebook in 2008 showed an average separation of 4.28 degrees. This only shows how the network has grown in the last 3 years. Although researchers say that it is unlikely that the trend will continue and even if 90% of the world was to join facebook, the degree of separation would not reduce by much.