( Microsoft researchers a few years before social networking exploded, found that 6 degrees of separation was about right and a Stanford Scientist won a Microsoft fellowship recently for his research into predicting your next Facebook friends.)įacebook and the University of Milan, which together studied both how many friends people have and how many degrees of separation there are between people in the world, concluded: "In these two works, we show how the Facebook social network is at once both global and local.
Dutch mathematician Edsger Dijkstra is credited with developing the algorithm that made it possible for Facebook researchers and others to find the shortest path between two nodes in a. Within the United States, most people are separated by 3 degrees (or 4 hops), and according to Facebook, some 84% of connections are between people in the same country. In 2016, researchers at Facebook reported that the social networking site had reduced the chain length of its members to three and a half degrees of separation. Degree 2 could be worth up to a whopping 2.5 million unique social impressions. First, touch 5000 friends (say across 3 peoples’ profiles) who have an average of 500 total FaceBook and/or Twitter friends each. Facebook says analyzing the data is not easy. When relevant content resonates, the first degree of separation can easily yield referrals to the second degree, which can have staggering socio-mathematical implications. Did you know that based on a study by Facebook done in 2011, the average number of acquaintances separating any two people in the world was 4.74. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has a 3.17 degrees of separation, but COO Sheryl Sandberg is much closer with 2.92. The number of hops between any two Facebook users, based on an algorithm developed at the University of Milan, was 5.28 in 2008 and now is down to 4.74, according to Facebook. According to a study done by social media monitoring firm Sysomos in 2010, the average Degrees of Separation between users on Twitter is 4.67. If you pick any two Facebook users, its been calculated theres an average of 3.57 'degrees of separation' between them. Citing what it calls the largest social networking studies ever, Facebook says the common notion of six degrees of separation between people knowing other people has become outdated.įacebook's data team writes in a blog post that the degrees of separation between any two people in the world has been seriously shrinking over the past 3 years as Facebook membership has boomed to 721 million active users (with an average of 190 friends), accounting for 10%-plus of the world's population.