Facebook’s ’3.74 degrees of separation’ is a world away from being significant | Matt Parker | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
►http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/nov/23/facebook-degrees-of-separation?fb=optOut
The area of mathematics known as “graph theory” looks at complicated networks and tries to understand their fundamental characteristics. While this is vital work when it comes to building robust computer networks, it does not tell us anything of great note about social degrees of separation. It’s not socially meaningful that a friend of your friends is buddies with an acquaintance of someone else’s pal. It’s just an innate feature of large, tangled networks.
So as much as I hate to maths on a parade, that isn’t actually very amazing. If everyone only had the median 100 friends this report found, that means you already have 10,000 friends of friends. If you include their 100 friends each, you’re at 1 million people within three degrees of separation. At five degrees of separation you have 10 billion people linked to you, which is greater than the Earth’s population.