Microsoft Says It’s A Small World After All

You have probably heard before that we are all connected within six degrees of each other or played the Kevin Bacon game.  Now there is more evidence to back this theory up.  Microsoft researchers looked at their Microsoft Messenger data for June 2006 and found that we’re all pretty much connected within 6.6 degrees just through Microsoft Messenger, Microsoft’s IM client.

Now this doesn’t take into account people that use other IM services or people who don’t use computers at all.  But it was a pretty large group - 240 million.  They found that within this group there is no more than 6.6 degrees of seperation between all their users.  This backs up the original study done in the 60’s  and a study done in 2003 with Yahoo Mail.

Eric Horvitz, one of the Microsoft researchers wonders if six is some kind of basic number in social communication.  More research needs to be done before anything can be said for sure, but it is intriguing that this number keeps coming up.

It’s funny and wondrous to me to think that a random person I see on the street probably knows a friend of a friend or a friend of a co-worker’s relative or whatever.  If there was a way to see these connections when you meet a stranger - that would be cool.  Perhaps when apps are developed that allow us to tag people’s pictures on our phones and their relationship to us some mashup will be created to connect all the dots.  Then it truly will be a small world.

See also: Nature News  Mashable