In six moves or less, you can connect anyone in Hollywood to Kevin Bacon via movie roles. The world is different now, thanks to Facebook. According to research from Facebook and Università degli Studi di Milano in Italy, the average number of connections between any two Facebook users isn’t six, it’s four. That means that you’re only 4 degrees from Kevin Bacon, who I assume uses Facebook.
There are currently 741 million Facebook users who are currently active. That’s 10 percent of the world’s population! It’s no wonder that the average number of hops from one person to the next random person has lowered from 5.28 hops in 2008 to 4.74 hops in 2011. Facebook’s connection map is incredible, which makes sense when you consider Mark Zuckerberg is connected to fictional Mark Zuckerberg by only one degree.
Of course, I’ve finally made the big leap of removing myself from Facebook, so I’m zero degrees of connectivity to everyone.
Tags: Facebook, four degrees of separation, Kevin Bacon, four hops between facebook users, facebook connections, Facebook research, Università degli Studi di Milano, 4 degrees of separation, social networking, 4.74 degrees of separation between Facebook users