6 degrees of MSN Messenger

by Brad Linder Mar 16th 2008

Will Smith and Kevin Bacon may both know that there's no more than six degrees of separation between everyone on the planet. But the folks at Microsoft's research division now have quantifiable proof. Well, sort of.

Microsoft Research did a bit of analysis with raw MSN messenger data. Without actually reading any private messages, (the data all remained anonymous) the team tracked the trajectory of 255 billion instant messages sent by 240 million people in June of 2006. Researchers were able to see where the message started and where it ended up.

In the end, you get a pretty map like the one above showing where MSN Messenger users are located. And you can also see which users are chatting it up with one another. And in the end, the team concluded that you could pretty much make a connection between any random MSN Messenger user and another with just 6.6 connections. In other words, a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend and a half of yours knows the person you may have just sent a message to.

Of course, the data only covers MSN Messenger statistics and doesn't take into account all the people using AOL, Yahoo!, or Google messengers, not to mention all the folks who don't IM or even have access to computers at all. But next time someone tells you that whole six degrees thing if bunk, now you can point them toward empircal(ish) proof.

[via Mashable and Nature]

Tags: IM, msn-messenger, research, six-degrees, six-degrees-of-separation

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

SimonF said 7:08PM on 3-16-2008

"In other words, a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend and a half of yours knows the person you may have just sent a message to"

That would be one degree of separation.... I prefer:

"In other words, a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend and a half of yours knows Bill Gates"

AlexL said 7:09PM on 3-16-2008

"We investigate on a planetary-scale the oft-cited report that people are separated by "six degrees of separation'' and find that the average path length among Messenger users is 6.6."

Once again people are making the same mistakes people initially made when Stanley Milgram first conducted his experiments. People assumed that it meant the degree of separation is 6 at the maximum, when Milgram in fact noted that 6 is the average. The same result was found here. 6 is actually just the average number of connections needed, and not the maximum. Which means that in fact some people may be separated by a much larger degree, but these separations are few and thus still averaged into 6.6 in the overall picture.

Jeffrey Horn said 7:11PM on 3-16-2008

The whole 6 degrees of separation thing is bunk, as the public understands it.

While it is generally true that only 6 degrees separate one person from another, the measure is typically cited as an average. Well, what kind of average? Are talking pure arithmetical mean, or median, or mode? These are all statistics used by scientists and laymen when they say "on average."

If it is an arithmetical mean, we must realize that the data is likely skewed to the right: that is to say, many more people are connected to others by 1 or 2 degrees of separation. Any two random people may be separated by no more than 6 degrees. In order to arrive at this average, quite a few people must also be separated by 12 degrees of separation, or even fewer by 20 or more degrees.

All I'm trying to say is its hard to call this empirical proof. Which is why you're right in calling it "empirical(ish)" evidence.

Wouldn't want anyone thinking they could get to Warren buffet by bugging a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend...

Laitman.com said 7:26PM on 4-12-2008

This research simply shows how we’re externally connected to each other. Soon, however, we will start discovering how internally connected we are, where we will see each other as living not in the bodies we see today, but in each other’s hearts.

Today, we lack the understanding of how the world becomes disclosed to us. For instance, our senses perceive something to the extent that this “something” is disclosed to them, and beforehand, it is as if this “something” had never existed. In other words, something we perceive is born in the same moment we discover it. Just take a look at the laws of nature we know about today: until we discovered them, it was as if they had never existed. Obviously, they had always existed, but we simply couldn’t perceive them: they existed in potential, instead of in action, with regard to us.

Baal HaSulam explains that the world is divided into a revealed and a concealed (secret) part. Therefore, the time we will discover the true connection among people (souls), we will know (with Mocha – mind) and feel (with Liba – heart), simultaneously, that everyone in the world is solely dependent on everyone else’s goodwill: People’s attitudes of love or hate will determine whether or not they will bring life or death upon others. http://www.laitman.com/2008/03/26/our-planet-is-only-as-big-as-a-house/

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