Only four degrees of separation, says Facebook

A recent article in One Per Cent indicates that we are only 4 degrees of separation away from any other person raising the question; Has social media made the world a smaller place?

Below is an extract but click the link in the title for the full story.

“We are all a lot closer to Kevin Bacon than we thought.

A few months ago, we reported that a Yahoo team planned to test the six degrees of separation theory on Facebook. Now, Facebook's own data team has beat them to the punch, proving that most Facebook users are only separated by four degrees."

"To test the six degrees theory, the Facebook researchers systematically tested how many friend connections they needed to link any two users. Globally, they found a sharp peak at five hops, meaning that most pairs of Facebook users could be connected through four intermediate people also on Facebook (92 per cent). Paths were even shorter within a single country, typically involving only three other people, even in large countries such as the US."