According to a study by researchers at Microsoft, when you map out the gigantic social network formed by billions of IM conversations, you get a familiar result:
The dataset which was collected in June 2006 contains summaries of 30 billion conversations among 240 million people. And they were very surprised to find that the average number of jumps to get from one random user to another was 6.6."
Yup--it's the whole "6 degrees of separation" thing.
This study has been led at Microsoft Research Redmond lab by Eric Horvitz and Jure Leskovec, who was an intern at the time. "Horvitz says he was surprised that their analysis so closely matched the 1967 result. He wonders whether the number six is a basic constant for social interactions. 'Do we have a natural harmonic for social communication?' he asks. 'This is my conjecture -- more work needs to be done on that.'"
(Via
Andrew Sullivan.)
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