Microsoft Proves the World Is Small – But A Little Larger Than We Expected

It looks like Microsoft is pretty serious about social networking - serious enough to carry out a dedicated study to prove Kevin Bacon's law of 6 degrees (that you can be linked to by anybody else by less than 7 acquaintances).

To prove this idea Microsoft used the database of Microsoft Messenger users for the study with the major goal of finding out what's the distance between two random people on Earth if they are connected online via IMs. And I guess Microsoft had quite a nice budget for this study - it was conducted back in June of 2006 and data processing time happened to last for 2 years. The study looked into 30 billion conversations between approximately 180 million people throughout the world (at the time it was half of the total IM users in the world). With this representative sample the researchers claimed that they had the largest social network in the world to study.

The results were not exactly what you would think - our usual understanding is 6 degrees of separation. Microsoft's study shoed that the value is a little higher - 6.6 connections on average between two random persons. At the same time there were cases where it took 29 connections to reach the needed individual so the results varied for a number of reasons.

Of course it is difficult not to wonder why would anyone carry out such a large-scale study only to prove what we really know. The researchers found some substantiation in the advantages this new understanding can bring to political organizations, charities and searches for missing persons.

There's also another point of a more civil internet community. Unfortunately many people choose internet anonymity along with fake names and avatars to pretend to be someone they were not. But if we actually know how close we all are to each other, will we all at least try to behave in a more civil manner - like we would if we were offline - simply real people with real faces and real names. We'll have to wait if Microsoft manages to offer some unexpected results to the study and will also provide some additional advantages, but if the study helps us realize how close we are and behave in a better way online, I'm all for Microsoft to continue investing in such studies.