In a post on it’s Data blog titled “Anatomy of a Social Network“, Facebook released the findings of two studies which were conducted in conjunction with the University of Milan. The studies were commissioned to see how connections and relationships have changed since Stanley Milgram’s 1967 study.
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Though Milgram’s never used the term himself, it was his finding that human society is a small world type network which popularised the notion of six degrees of separation, upon which the “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” theory is based.
The results were reached by using algorithms to look at 721-million active Facebook users with 69-billion friendships among them. Facebook says that, to date, these are the largest social network studies ever released.
The social network wrote that as it and the world continues to grow, latest numbers saying we have crossed the 7-billion threshold, users on its networks have been able to shrink the number of people it takes to connect them.
“As Facebook has grown over the years, representing an ever larger fraction of the global population, it has become steadily more connected,” it said.
It says that there has been a steady decline in the number of “hops” it takes to connect two individuals. “The average distance in 2008 was 5.28 hops, while now it is 4.74”.
Though the world degree of separation was 4.74, when looking at an individual country, most pairs of people are only separated by 3 degrees, the studies found.
While the findings of these studies are all very interesting, the one obvious question they failed to answer is, if Kevin Bacon is the centre of the entertainment universe, who is the centre of Facebook?
