No degrees of separation?
I recently got spammed invited to participate in Karl Bubyan’s Six Degrees of Separation application in Facebook. This application navigates the ’social graph’ in Facebook, offering a couple of tools to allow the user to test the ‘Six degrees of separation‘ hypothesis. The application and its interface seem quite slick - and it has the now obligatory visualisation (reproduced here).
There’s an irony here. The six degrees of separation idea can only work if there is some barrier to being directly connected to someone else. In the real world, where relationships are subtle, complex and often not immediately apparent, the game of trying to trace the connections and counting the ‘hops’ from one person to another to reach the ‘target’ person can be diverting. On Facebook, at least so far, there is only one way in which users can be connected, and that is through the ‘friendship’ model. In such a simple model, the degrees of separation between any two users are relatively easy to calculate. Although a user can be several degrees of separation removed from another, the barrier to them becoming directly connected is very low - all they need do is become Facebook friends. And how many Facebook users have turned down a request for ‘friendship’….?
So, I suggest that for any actual person in whom you are interested, Facebook presents two degrees of separation:
- infinitely separated (the other person does not have a user account on Facebook at all)
- a separation of zero (you are Facebook friends)
Will these global ’social-software’ tools such as Facebook gradually make the ‘degrees of separation’ notion irrelevant?
Still, this tool is quite interesting in terms of what it allows the user to discover about their relationship to other, named, users, before the user immediately renders it irrelevant by ‘befriending’ them!
And it’s surely interesting that, within the population of Facebook users who have installed this application (4.2 million at the time of writing), the average number of degrees of separation is, wait for it…… 6.12!
Technorati Tags: Facebook, Karl Bubyan, social-software, six-degrees-of-separation, social-graph
October 8th, 2007 at 8:38 am
[...] unknown wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptIn such a simple model, the degrees of separation between any two users are relatively easy to calculate. Although a user can be several degrees of separation removed from another, the barrier to them becoming directly connected is very … [...]
October 8th, 2007 at 11:20 am
LinkedIn has a slightly more realistic concept of “degrees of separation”. Although, in reality, it can suffer from the same problem you identify here.
The goal of LinkedIn is to enable you to find professional connections. With such connections it is not a “I want to be your friend” link. It is more of a “I think we may be able to help one another” connection. So, you find someone via linkedin (as a result of looking for someone with my skill set) you are immediately presented with the shortest path to be introduced to that person.
I wonder if this tool you talk about can do the same thing in FaceBook. That is, can I ask it what my shortest path of connections from me to person XYZ is?
October 8th, 2007 at 1:55 pm
Well, the Facebook tool does the second half of this - it will show the ‘route’ to a given person (actually, user). But it doesn’t do the automatic matching thing, although I feel sure other FB tools will do this. Possibly/probably FB is being used as a dating/match-making tool? I wouldn’t know…..
October 9th, 2007 at 12:19 pm
You would think it could make use of the knows someone through a friend connector (e.g. Vashti knows Keith Richards through Johnny Depp) to indicate at least another level of separation. Although it is all very subjective. In North Wales we rarely get more than one degree of separation anyway, it’s too small a community!
August 12th, 2008 at 1:20 am
I’m new to this six degrees thing. MY question is what is the point of connection? Maybe I’m not understanding it correctly. So their are six people that essentially link you to a person and once linked you have then connected all the ties thus far to connect your self to every one, in a sense? If I’m understanding it correctly, then what? And how would one know that they have found the sixth person? Again I might not be understanding it correctly at all. I would like to find that facebook test thing though. I was invited to add a group about it and thought of the question, what if those in our connection don’t have a facebook account. I don’t understand the separation of zero part. If you’re friends with the person then there is no connection? Maybe it’s all related my misunderstanding of the theory in the first place. ?? If you could answer any thing I’d appreciate it. Though if not that is fine too because I may just confused things more.