Yahoo, Facebook Test "Six Degrees of Separation" 228
An anonymous reader writes "Yahoo has partnered with Facebook to test the iconic social experiment known as 'six degrees of separation' (everyone is on average approximately six steps away from any other person on Earth). The goal of the Small World Experiment is to determine the social path length between two strangers by tapping into the world's largest social network and its 750 million users, each of whom have an average of 130 friends." Looks like a fun project, but not quite as useful as knowing how close you are to Kevin Bacon.
facebook yahoo data sync? (Score:2, Insightful)
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I know there's little to no chance that my Yahoo accounts will know about my other accounts. I haven't updated any of my personal information (such as where I live) in either of them. One has a location from 3 moves ago, the other from 4 moves. There's little to no chance of the accounts syncing with each other, much less with anything I might have on a social networking site.
The key is that all of these social networking sites and email providers only have the information you give them. They can guess
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you forget about all the facebook web beacon javascript, all the major websites have them. (noscript ftw!)
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you forget about all the facebook web beacon javascript, all the major websites have them. (noscript ftw!)
And about everyone he knows who has him in their address book and friends list.
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Companies like Acxiom [acxiom.com] do this all the time.
In fact..likely as not, facebook already uses them to help 'clean' data....lots of companies do like Visa, etc...
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I found out just how accessible information can be several years ago when I worked on a project involving a collections/skiptracing firm. For a quarter you could get conglomerations of various data sources that would pinpoint most targets current location - including address and phone number. One guy they were looking for while I was in the office was tough enough to find they sent it out to one of their private investigators. For $75 he not only found the guy's location (a secluded island only reachable
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Yep. Even this site uses google-analytics. It's scary how much information is picked up from your surfing habits almost anywhere on the web.
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Noscript, Adblock, Flashblock, Cookie Monster, Better Privacy. Flush browser cache on exit. New email address for every site I join. A few other tricks...
Makes the web a much nicer place and my habits much harder to correlate between different places.
I mean except panopticick type stuff browser fingerprinting, but then I'm not sure how much of that data can get back to the site without various forms of scripting.
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Pretty much.
I recognise entirely that this only solves the problem for me and not for the average user, and it's not even a full solution - occasionally I have to start up chrome because some or other site that I want to use in a more than read-only way won't work.
But I'd rather do this than have a slower, more annoying web experience and be tracked constantly. There is far, far too much active content on the web IMHO. The fact that the browsing experience is (for the majority of sites I care to visit) actu
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You might be missing out on some great deals just because they can't connect you to the relevant offers.
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You might want to add this [mvps.org] to your list of privacy-enhancing tools: Should also work with Linux and Mac.
Example:
127.0.0.1 www.google-analytics.com #[Google Analytics]
127.0.0.1 4.afs.googleadservices.com
Google, alone, has over 100 entries like the above in my HOSTS file. Speeds up surfing. In Firefox, at least, you do take a performance hit when you restart the browser after making any change to this, rather large, file. No noticeable lag at startup after that until you make another change to HOST
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yes, and more importantly, they'll have new opportunities for selling marketing data and data mining services.
win-win all around for the both of them
Everyone should drop the facebook, and get their own virtual host website for less than $5 a month, and put pictures and have comments / blog there. Or set up a web server at home and use a free dynamic dns, it's good geeky fun. plenty of my-website-in-a-can packages out there.
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wordpress is easier for non nerds...
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Likewise, everyone should drop their phone company and set up their own CLEC. Or maybe everyone else isn't a socially hostile and ultra paranoid geek and are willing to trade information that's publicly available anyway for a convenient and centralized site for social interaction.
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"Everyone should drop the facebook, and get their own virtual host website "
Uh, right.
The value of a social network is determined by the number of users it has. Facebook has 750 million. Your own private server, EVEN IF people know how the hell to set one up, which they don't, will only have a few. Thus, it will be nearly useless compared to facebook.
Not to mention that people have NO IDEA how to set up and run their own web host, they don't want to know, and shouldn't have to know. Computers should not be that difficult to operate.
What you want only works in your fantasy world, not in the real one. This is a common thing with slashdot geeks: they don't understand that they're in a tiny tiny niche and most people want very different things.
LOL!!!
POWER WHOOSH!
I like waking up and being able to read a good chuckle-worthy post, quickly.
This is a common thing with slashdot geeks: they don't understand that they're in a tiny tiny niche and most people want very different things.
This is a common thing with slashdot geeks: they don't understand when they've read a whooooooooooosh.
tftfya
-AI
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This seems like a totally absurd way of doing it... it will only use a minimal fraction of the information available, and that in the most inefficient and unreliable way possible.
If this is really how they hope to achieve results, they might as well walk on the street and ask people.
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Seems like a really poor way to go about doing it. Might as well just do the calculations themselves. Much faster, and will produce a vastly more reliable answer.
I also enjoy the constant use of the adjectives "average" and "approximately" whenever the magic "six steps" are mentioned. I can tell you right now that everyone is on average, approximately 6 steps away from everyone else. (for certain large definitions of approximately, and for a certain averaging method which will be named later.)
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Wait... that description *isn't* about some random chain mail spam, but something with two major companies behind it? Seriously?
Artificial Test in an Artificial World ... (Score:3, Insightful)
TFS: " each of whom have an average of 130 friends "
... where the validity of hitherto common concepts vanishes.
CC.
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i'm at about this number. doesn't mean i hang out with everyone but i've known these people at some point in my life. some people i haven't seen for years
i'm less than 6 degrees from an old country music star and a dentist in florida who's in jail for killing his wife 20 some years ago.
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My question though, is why can't facebook just run a simple algorithm to test the max degrees of separation between any two people?
I think it would be both interesting and hilarious for FB or G+ or any of those social networking sites to offer a "penpal" service where you get to meet the dude on the social opposite/antipode of the planet from you (who none the less has a common language with you). Kind of like a grown up version of writing to pen pals when you were a schoolchild.
My "social antipode" would probably be a bilingual Pakistani Imam, or maybe a neolithic-era African tribesman (essentially, I'm thinking of their continent's
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My "social antipode" would probably be a bilingual Pakistani Imam,
Congratulations... you're a winner of a nice, new, shiny warrantless wiretap.
"connected" by facebook, really? (Score:2)
How do they determine real connections vs just having browsed some random strangers' cute/funny/whatever profile and saving it just for that? I'm pretty sure the original theorist would scoff at the notion that's a real social connection. LinkedIn would be much better but even then you'd have to filter out all the recruiters.
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Real science is always scoffed at buy businessmen because it often gets in the way of profit. Profit is only generated by bullshitting people, and science is the act of making people see the facts. No businessman wants you to see the facts or even consider them.
Think about it. Someone buys something ridiculously cheap and resells it for insane profit. That's crazy! But it happens every day and even SCIENTISTS buy things at five times the standard material price, or more! Except of course, DIY people. These
Re:"connected" by facebook, really? (Score:5, Funny)
Get help before you end up like Kaczynski.
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Kaczynski was anti-technology... GP has a two digit Slashdot ID and still posts!
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Sounds Great! (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh whoops while we were performing this test we accidentally shared a whole bunch of private information with our partners.
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Oh whoops while we were performing this test we accidentally shared a whole bunch of private information with our partners.
...and transmitted your wifi ssid and geolocation, provided access to your account to a 3rd party without a password, and inadvertently disclosed to law enforcement that you were browsing news articles that favored hacking as a form of right to free speech.
But it's okay we fixed all that recently.
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Paul Erdos (Score:5, Insightful)
The editor should be banished from /. for mentioning the Bacon number and not the Erdos number.
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Smallest. Shame on you for this!
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Smallest. Shame on you for this!
Anybody can get a low erdos number. I have a semi-distant acquaintance with a "3" so it would not be terribly difficult for me to score a "4". Perhaps I could help her prove something on a compute cluster, to get credit on one of her papers.
The real challenge is getting a high number. You must publish or perish. To publish you'll probably have to collaborate, what comes around goes around and if you want to be listed on 10 papers that you didn't do much on them, you've gotta accept ten freeloaders on yo
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Anybody can get a low erdos number. I have a semi-distant acquaintance with a "3" so it would not be terribly difficult for me to score a "4".
That's because of your definition of "low". A 4 is low for the number of kittens in cat lady's house, or the magnitude of an earthquake, but it is not low for an Erdos number, with the median being 5 and the average 4.65. So 4 is, as you too realize, very common and thus is far from being considered "low".
Low Erdos number means 1, 2 or at most 3.
Erdos-Bacon (Score:2)
No, the real challenge is getting a particularly low (or particulary high, but defined) Erdos-Bacon number.
Travelling Salesman (Score:2)
Re:Travelling Salesman (Score:5, Informative)
It's not a travelling salesman problem, it's a shortest path problem, and as such is much easier. For the distance between two specific people, you'd need the Dijkstra algorithm, and for the distance between any two people, you could use Floyd-Warshall. This one is in O(n^3), where n is the number of users; that's a big number, but it's nowhere near the (supposed) complexity of the TSP.
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The fact that it is undirected and unweighted makes it even faster -- sub O(n^3) by at least one or more log factors depending on the density of the grpah. The shear size of the graph would make for a fun implementation, but it is entirely doable.
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Travelling salesman doesn't seem to be an issue here, as the six-degrees of separation thing is a simple exercise of finding the shortest path between two people, not finding the shortest path crossing N people (with large N). And path finding isn't very complex, just throw some Dijkstra's algorithm [wikipedia.org] at it and be done with it.
Of course what they are doing in the "experiment" (ad campaign?) isn't actually finding the shortest path, its about letting the users themselves try to find it by sending messages via
Re:Travelling Salesman (Score:5, Informative)
This has been done before. There used to be a site called Six Degrees, which was a social network that showed your contacts at various distances.
Which was swallowed by Orkut. Which was swallowed by Google.
By the way, the original theory is that six degrees is the _maximum_ distance between any two living humans, not the average.
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If so, that's trivial to disprove. There are about 100 uncontacted tribes of humans in the world. Choose one. Find the shortest path to yourself. There is no path.
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On the contrary. If you know the tribe exists, then somebody in the civilized world knows somebody in the tribe. The tribe contact likely knows everyone in the tribe. The civilized contact has a good chance of being a research scientist, and has a very large number of contacts. Since the civilized person to any tribe member is a maximum of 2 degrees, then the researched need only be connected to everyone else via 4 degrees, which may not be out of the realm of possibility given that most well-heeled resear
You rarely need six (Score:2)
My friend and I used to play this "connections" game, mostly with movie stars, and always with funny variations like "Connect Tim Burton to Orson Welles, using the movie The Cannonball Run." We almost never needed six degrees to make even the most obscure connections. My favorite example was one we did when Rob Morrow played John Wilkes Booth in a miniseries: "Connect Rob Morrow to John Wilkes Booth." Seems hard no? Not really:
John Wilkes Booth's brother Junius was married to Agnes Booth, who was in the Pal
I know everyone (Score:2)
The "friends" fallacy (Score:2)
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Just to point out I've never met the Queen and have I never "known" her.
the Pope £uc$ed me once.
privacy of connections (Score:3)
did facebook and yahoo ask permission of all these users before rifling through their profiles?
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Seems kind of dumb. (Score:2)
Using Facebook to test this theory seems kind of dumb. I'm Facebook friends with the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, so it would appear that there is one degree of separation between me and his All Holiness. And because Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew is acquainted with Pope Benedict XVI, then there are only two degrees of separation between me and the Pope -- or between me and any number of world leaders or other important people. But, of course, I have never met the Ecumenical Patriarch, so yo
That's exactly the original purpose of Orkut (Score:2)
It was a fun experiment in the beginning because not only the path between you and Orkut was drawn, but the path between you and anyone you looked at the profile.
But then, when the first batch of geeks
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Cue the lawsuits in 3...2... (Score:2)
(potential employer, after reviewing the social "map" of said candidate and seeing they're only 2 "degrees" away from a convicted sex molester...) "Well, we would like to hire you, but it seems that after further review, we don't feel you're quite a solid fit for the position."
Yeah, tell me that kind of abuse ain't gonna start happening...
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What an interesting game. The only winning move is not to play.
Kevin Bacon? (Score:3)
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I have a personal Kevin Bacon number of 4. I worked on a student film with a friend who later did costuming on a movie featuring Dan Aykroyd. Aykroyd was in 'Chaplin' with Laurel Whitsett, and Laurel Whitsett was in 'Super' with Kevin Bacon.
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She definitely knows Bill Clinton.
That depends on what your definition of "know" [merriam-webster.com] is. Technically, she only gave him a blowjob, which wouldn't qualify for definition #3.
But she did know a cigar that would give him a solid 4.
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I had bacon-wrapped hot peppers this weekend, so I got you beat.
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technically this applied to acting credits (Score:2)
One degree was with someone who acted with him, etc.
I supposed IMDB could be topologized to measure two actors' separation.
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No separation = You are Kevin Bacon
One degree = in a movie with Kevin Bacon
A guy from my high school drama club was one of the muggers in Crocodile Dundee ("that's not a knife"). If plays are included in addition to movies, that gets me a Bacon number of 6 or 7.
If you don't restrict connections to performances, Larry David's daughter was my R.A. in college. From there, Larry David was in Seinfeld with the guy who played Neuman, who was in Jurassic Park with Jeff Goldblum, and eventually someone was in som
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That puts all of us at 3 step max because we visit the same website as you. That's about as valid as Facebook's idea of what Facebook friends are.
did anyone read the article? (Score:3, Interesting)
Everyone here is bitching about privacy breach, algorithm complexity etc. Actually it has nothing to do with this experiment. From TFA
"Anyone with a Facebook account can participate to verify if everyone is on average approximately six steps away from any other person on Earth. You’ll be asked to select one of your Facebook friends whom you believe is most likely to know the “target person” that has been assigned to you. A message will then be sent from friend to friend until you get it to the “target person.” The goal is to do this in as few steps as possible. "
Basically they are just repeating the old mail experiment, but with a new way of passing messages
- unless you (or one of your friends) participates nothing happens to your privacy
- no computer algorithm is involved
- no problem with celebrity profiles linking thousands of people that now nothing about each other
MOD PARENT UP! (Score:3)
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Everyone here is bitching about privacy breach, algorithm complexity etc. Actually it has nothing to do with this experiment. From TFA
"Anyone with a Facebook account can participate to verify if everyone is on average approximately six steps away from any other person on Earth. You’ll be asked to select one of your Facebook friends whom you believe is most likely to know the “target person” that has been assigned to you. A message will then be sent from friend to friend until you get it to the “target person.” The goal is to do this in as few steps as possible. "
Basically they are just repeating the old mail experiment, but with a new way of passing messages
- unless you (or one of your friends) participates nothing happens to your privacy
- no computer algorithm is involved
- no problem with celebrity profiles linking thousands of people that now nothing about each other
You're right about the privacy angle, but not about the algorithm.
It's still an algorithm, just with people making choices instead of the computer.
some social networks do this already (Score:2)
Hubs... (Score:2)
Wikipedia (Score:2)
This is how it works (Score:2)
This is how it works.
Suppose everyone knows roughly 50 other people. If you add together your family (all of them - even distant cousins), the people you know at work, church, through your hobbies, your neighbors, your mailman and so on... the total is around 50.
Every one of these 50 people knows 50 *other* people, and every one of those 2500 people again knows 50 *other* people, so that the circle expands exponentially in powers of 50.
Of course, this isn't a complete description since at every stage there
*Average* of six degrees? (Score:2)
I always thought that the *maximum* was six degrees of separation between virtually everyone. Thus, an average would lower than six degrees...and any instances of more than six degrees would be in the minority, or outliers that may simply be because not everyone is accounted for.
Of course, this also depends on what your criteria for each degree of separation. Do you have to be just facebook friends, or should you actually have had some real physical contact (i.e., being the same room together), or verbal
Inefficient, outdated experiment set-up (Score:2)
You’ll be asked to select one of your Facebook friends whom you believe is most likely to know the “target person” that has been assigned to you. A message will then be sent from friend to friend until you get it to the “target person.” The goal is to do this in as few steps as possible.
One of the crucial points of the Small World thing is that you can't predict your indirect acquaintances (or even the regions/groups they are in) more than one or at most two degrees away. We don't have some kind of global routing table in our head. I have dozens of friends in the US. It's quite possible that one of them is related to a former classmate of a relative of a former colleague of someone who knows Obama. Even assuming this is the case, I have no way of guessing who that would be.
Instead of relyi
Misconception of concept + misapplication of same (Score:2)
First off, the entire notion of "six degrees of separation" is based on a study that was later partially discredited. Milgram's study was flawed in a number of ways, later described by Judith Kleinfeld [judithkleinfeld.com] and others.
Secondly, even assuming that the "six degrees" effect was accurate, using facebook is not the same as the initial experiment at all. Facebook is a radically different method of connecting people.
It's interesting that Duncan Watts is mentioned in the article but that he isn't allowed to actually exp
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Isn't the theory that by amassing giga-libraries-of-congress, of personal data you'll get relevant and personalized ads?
Nope, turns out they are just as irrelevant as the least targeted ads, such as TV.
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Facebook doesn't know anything about me. I have subscribed there and posted there for a long time.
They sell the information they have collected on me to other companies and they make a tidy profit for it, but the funny thing is that what they are selling has nothing to do with me. It won't help someone market better to me. It won't help someone convince me to buy something.
The reason this kind of thing doesn't work is pretty easy. I'm the kind of person that makes purchasing decisions based on the actual products or services and my perception of them, along with my decision of whether to trust them. Anyone working with Facebook I automatically distrust. I never trusted Yahoo to begin with, especially when they had the overgrown mess of a website back when Google was starting its journey.
So it really doesn't surprise me that Facebook has partnered with Yahoo, but to be honest I couldn't give a shit about it.
This is just ivy league idiots passing money around. There is nothing more going on here.
How do you know for sure that your purchasing decisions are made by *intentional* perceptions of products, and not by the subtly controlled environment you subject yourself to when engaging in things like Facebook? Heck, by your own admission all I would have to do (as a marketer) is somehow dis-align my brand with Facebook and I will be excluded from your circle of distrust. After that it's only a matter of time before that distinction creeps into a purchase decision. People put so much more unconscious
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Good for you for being an informed consumer, but if you are anything like a normal person you generally value your purchases based on some degree of personal satisfaction, and not based on the thought that everyone *else* is happy with it. In this regard, all too often people make the wrong choice at a rate proportionate with how much time they invested in "research" of said purchase, which runs contrary to expectations but it is nevertheless the outcome of many consumer behavior studies. It would seem tha
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I'm the kind of person that makes purchasing decisions based on the actual products or services and my perception of them, along with my decision of whether to trust them.
Your mistake is missing that you only make decisions on the products you know about, or where you can burn thru the confuseopoly to get real info.
Thru aggressive narrowcasting, its possible to avoid entire swaths of not just pop culture, but even science and technology. Ye olden glory days of everyone watching the same TV broadcast and reading the same best seller are long gone.
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facebook "friend" doesn't mean the same as the usual word frield. It includes friends, family, acquaintances, and people who were friends a decade ago.
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Before I deleted my FB account a year or so ago, I had:
A kid I sat next to in study hall in my sophomore year of high school in the 90s.
A kid who ate at "my" lunch table in 8th grade in the 80s.
A girl from college who supposedly lived in my dorm in the 90s, although I don't remember her at all.
A salesguy from a satellite office who I met once at HQ back in 2002, but I couldn't not friend him without offending a real local friend
A recruiter who never got me a job, but I didn't want to offend her by defriendi
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A "friend" who is offended by you not friending a Facebook profile is not really a friend.
If they were before, they will probably choose not to, anymore
But knowing human nature, you're a little too hopeful. The whole reason we all join any group is peer pressure. Peer pressure's power is that we prefer to avoid being "offensive" to the askers, and the more people are in, the more we fear well offend by staying outside.
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People always seem to call acquaintances friends. A friend is someone who will drive 1200 miles overnight to bail you out of a jail in Mississippi, or give you the pillow treatment when your family won't let them disconnect the feeding tube. So, I might have 200 FB friends but, in the end really only 3 or 4 that would pass the friendship test in the previous sentence ;-)
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It's easier to visualize if you think how many address book contacts we spread out through all semi-active and fully active hotmail, gmail and yahoo accounts.
Since the mainstream only has one Facebook account t hold all potential friendships, now you merge 25 contacts here with 50 there and 10 there, it adds up. Count all those low-maintenance friendships and the fact that Facebook is almost a rolodex to a level that your ephimeral SIM card cannot provide when you switch companies, and 200 starts to make
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Yes, if you have 1,000,000 nodes and there are at least 499,994,500,020 edges out of a possible 499,999,500,000 (ie. a bit more than 99.999% of them), then yes you can conclude the diameter of the graph is no more than 6. But no, simply counting the number of edges is not particularly useful. You need to make further assumptions about the graph to get a useful bound.
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Not really, no. It's about scale-free networks (Networks that have preferential attachment, IE, people with tons of friends are more likely to get new friends than peop
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There's nothing special about the number six. Larger or less well connected networks will require more steps to traverse, and vice versa for smaller or more highly connected networks.
However that number increases as the logarithm of the number of nodes in the network, so you need a much larger network to get much past 6. If each person has 14 friends, then you will find 6^14=78bn people within 6 steps of you. If each person has 15 friends, you find 470bn friends within 6 steps. So you can see that the s
Re:its a scam (Score:4, Insightful)
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My first thought: They're setting up a 'partnership' to do this?? Surely they either (a) already know, or (b) can do it in less time than it took to type out that summary.
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