Facebook, Yahoo to test Six Degrees Theory

This week, Yahoo Research launched an online study to test the theory that anyone in the world can reach anyone else in “six degrees of separation.”

Using Facebook and its social graph of 750 million users, Yahoo’s “Small World Experiment” invites people worldwide to attempt to send a message to a specified “target” by creating an online chain of connections, Adweek.com reported.

Led by Duncan Watts, principal research scientists at Yahoo Research, the study puts a high-tech spin on a 1967 experiment by Harvard researcher Stanley Milgram. . Though its findings were not definitive, it ultimately led to the popular “six degrees” hypothesis.
Cameron Marlow, Facebook’s chief data scientist, said that because Facebook’s social graph is essentially the best representation of real world relationships available, “our data can speak more definitively to this question than anything else in history.”

“We believe that the average distance between two people is shrinking mostly because the types of connections you maintain online are a much better representation of people you know than the set of people you think about on a regular basis,” he said. “The fact that you transcribed all of your relationships into something like Facebook allows you to stay in touch with a much wider audience. This give us not only a measurement on just how the world actually is but how well people can utilize those relationships to route messages across the world.”