A recent study by Facebook, the Università degli Studi di Milano, and other contributors revises the claim that every living person on earth is connected to any other person through only six intermediaries (friends, friends of friends, friends of friends of friends, and so on)--a.k.a. "six degrees of separation"--a theory previously developed by Hungarian author Frinyes Karinthy in the 1920s and American social psychologist Stanley Milgram in the 1960s.
The new study reports that worldwide fully 92 per cent of all pairs of Facebook users are within five degrees of separation, with an average of just 4.74 intermediaries, and (here comes the part I love) the average number of degrees between users is getting smaller over time. In a blog posting yesterday, Facebook reported that today's average of 4.74 degrees of separation is already smaller than the average distance of 5.28 degrees in 2008.
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