An article in today’s Washington Post describes recent confirmation of the reality of a major underlying smart mobs principle. With a main title hyping the popular Kevin Bacon Game illustration, the article’s subtitle tells us: Microsoft Study Supports Small World Theory. Some excerpts from the WP article:

Turns out, it is a small world.

The “small world theory,” embodied in the old saw that there are just “six degrees of separation” between any two strangers on Earth, has been largely corroborated by a massive study of electronic communication. . . .

For the purposes of their experiment, two people were considered to be acquaintances if they had sent one another a text message. The researchers looked at the minimum chain lengths it would take to connect 180 billion different pairs of users in the database. They found that the average length was 6.6 steps and that 78 percent of the pairs could be connected in seven hops or less.

Some pairs, however, were separated by as many as 29 hops.

“Via the lens provided on the world by Messenger, we find that there are about ‘7 degrees of separation’ among people,” they wrote. . . .

It also means that, strictly speaking, six degrees of separation might be just a bit off. It’s closer to seven, at least in their study.

“For a piece of folklore, it wasn’t bad,” said Duncan J. Watts, one of the Columbia researchers, now at Yahoo Research. “It was off only in its detail.”

An article in today’s Washington Post describes recent confirmation of the reality of a major underlying smart mobs principle. With a main title hyping the popular Kevin Bacon Game illustration, the article’s subtitle tells us: Microsoft Study Supports Small World Theory. Some excerpts from the WP article:
Turns out, it is a small world.
The “small world [...]