ASIA, AUGUST 19, 2011: You don’t have to be Kevin Bacon to test your six degrees of separation. Yahoo! Labs has tied up with Facebook for the launch of an experiment called “ Six Degrees”, a test proving how anyone in the world can get a message to anyone else in just "six degrees of separation".
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FROM PLAY to PAPERWORK: Yahoo! works on measuring six-degrees of separation
Yahoo! Labs is continuing its pioneering work in human social dynamics and systems to investigate some of the most compelling and interesting phenomena relevant to the science of the Web. With “Six Degrees”, the team is partnering with Facebook to see how people are connected and share information, leveraging the Facebook social graph to provide a granularity of insights previously difficult to measure and quantify. The experiment kicked off this week and the team expects to develop their insights and publish their findings in peer reviewed academic literature over the coming months. Understanding human networks and social sharing is an important part of leading in the digital media space and will benefit Yahoo! in the long-term.
The study was was ignited by a 1967 research from Harvard sociologist Stanley Milgram. He sent roughly 300 letters to randomly selected people in Omaha, Nebraska with the instruction to get the letter to a single "target" individual– a stockbroker in Boston. Milgram told his "senders" some information about the target–his name, address, and occupation, for example–so that if they did not know him personally (and it was extremely unlikely that they would), they could send the letter to someone they did know who they thought would be "closer" to the target than they. Thus began a chain of senders, each member of the chain attempting to zero in on the target by sending the letter to someone else–a friend, family member, business associate, or casual acquaintance.
Milgram’s surprising finding was that, over all the chains that eventually reached the target (about 60 out of the initial 300), the average number of steps in a chain was only 6–a result that has entered folklore as the phrase "Six Degrees of Separation" (a play, and even a movie have been made with the same name).
Today the “Milgram Theory is put to the test,” using one of the most widely-used modern communcations tools known to man – Facebook. So how small do you think the world really is? Click here to find out now.
CREDITS:
IMAGE by Chris Drum via Flickr.
