Instant messaging world confirms six degrees of separation
| A social graph derived from billions of instant messages validates folklore that there are about six degrees of separation between any two strangers on the planet. |
Any two? 😯
So Bin Laden isn’t all that far removed from President Bush after all. And neither of them is so far from me. Weird.
| A research team at US software giant Microsoft studied 30 billion instant messages sent by 240 million people in June of 2006 and determined that, on average, any two could be linked in 6.6 steps.
"Weve been able to put our finger on the social pulse of human connectivity – on a planetary scale – and weve confirmed that its indeed a small world." Microsoft researcher Eric Horvitz told AFP on Monday. […] Horvitz and colleague Jure Leskovec estimate that the Microsoft Messenger chats they studied amount to half of the instant messages sent worldwide in June two years ago. |
That’s a staggering amount of messages!
(What a boring job.)
| The researchers stress that they were not privy to the contents of messages and that information indicating peoples identities was removed. |
Yeah. Sure. 🙄
Uuh, what if one doesn’t use instant messaging?