CorpComms Magazine

The distance between people is shrinking as social networks become more established, according to research produced by Facebook's data team. 

The idea of 'six degrees of separation', that any two people are on average separated by no more than six intermediate connections, was first proposed in 1929 in a short story by Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy. It was later made popular by the John Guare play and film, Six Degrees of Separation.

The idea was tested in the 1960s, by social psychologist Stanley Milgram who famously argued that any two people in the world are separated by only a small number of intermediate connections.

Using state-of-the-art algorithms developed by the Università degli Studi di Milano, the team sought to determine how many hops there were between all individuals on Facebook.

While 99.6 per cent of all pairs of users are connected by paths with five degrees (six hops), 92 per cent are connected by only four degrees (five hops).

The new data shows the effect of the growth of Facebook on social connectedness. The average distance in 2008 was 5.28 hops, while now it stands at 4.74.

The median number of Facebook friends stands at 100.

The research examined all 721 million active Facebook users (more than 10 per cent of the global population), with 69 billion friendships among them.

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