You're Only 5 Degrees of Separation Away From Kevin Bacon

Last Friday I wrote a post that included the topic "Six Degrees of Separation." I went back through the archives and found a post I had written on the subject. With the use of Social Media we now have more clarity into the whole "Small World" concept. After reading the article ask yourself, how far removed from your next employer are you?

Connect Marlon Brando with Kevin Bacon, ok.... go! So Brando was in Apocalypse Now which starred Martin Sheen who played Queenan in The Departed which also starred Leonardo DiCaprio. Leo played Frank Abagnale Jr. in Catch Me If You Can beside of Tom Hanks who once co-starred with Kevin Bacon in Apollo 13. 

So maybe I could do better at this game. Facebook and the University of Milan has announced that on average we are only 5 (4.74 actually) degrees away from anybody in the world. It was Stanley Milgram who first introduced the concept that we were 5.2, or  six "hops" away from anybody in the world. 

Milgram's 1967 "small world experiment" drew on 296 while Facebook was able to utilize it's 721 million active user database, which is more than 10 percent of the world's population. Facebook found that 99.6% of all users are connected by paths with 5 degrees (6 hops) and 92% are connected by only 4 degrees. These percentages were based on global users but when focusing on a single country the average falls to 3.

The internet has created a more connected world but Facebook took credit for helping us get more connected.

"And as Facebook has grown over the years, representing an ever larger fraction of the global population, it has become steadily more connected," the network said in a blog announcing its finding. "The average distance in 2008 was 5.28 hops, while now it is 4.74."

Facebook was willing to point out that there are differences in its study and the on Milgram conducted.

 It is important to note that while Milgram was motivated by the same question (how many individuals separate any two people), these numbers are not directly comparable; his subjects only had limited knowledge of the social network, while we have a nearly complete representation of the entire thing. Our measurements essentially describe the shortest possible routes that his subjects could have found.

Have any interesting stories on the "Six degrees of separation" game or being connected to any celebrities? Let us know!