Microsoft Proves the World Is Small – But A Little Larger Than We Expected
by
on August 04, 2008,
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.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to profy RSS feed!
Svetlana Gladkova
Opensource 
Michael Fidler 
ha, i read the book on this, and the 6 degrees thing was just what they told them in kindergarten, to sort of make a point that the world was a bit smaller and comfier that they previously thought.
by the time you get to the end of the book, and have matured, grown in consciousness, established a more subtle understanding, the climax is great. it turns out there are NO degrees of separation between anybody or anything.
some of the more juvenile minds still needed convincing, to them it was pointed out that nature was the perfect example of a seamlessly whole system … scrape the dust off a leaf in brazil, it came from the sahara, etc.
it is consciousness that turns out to be the unifying factor for people. the group mind, collective intelligence, the terms batted about in the early days of the internet when “social media” was, like, really cool. such a sad beginning, and such an amazing ending.
technology is just consciousness in action, and when the tech hooked it all up, the mind saw that it could already do it all. some guys called it the singularity, but that was just words. the knowers simple were connected to everything everywhere all at once, and had small smiles. sort of like the buddha.
enjoy reality,
gregory lent
Gregory, thanks for the comment. True, 6 degrees was something people just wanted to believe, not really results of a scientific research or anything. And what I think is amazing about the whole story is that Microsoft spent 2 years (and supposedly a pretty amount of money) to prove the assumption that does not really have any serious consequences.