We’ve all heard the common wisdom that every single person in the world is connected through six degrees of separation. The concept dates back to Stanley Milgram’s 1967 “small world experiment,” which measured connections in the United States by tracking a package in the mail sent between two randomly selected people. In 2008, Microsoft conducted research analyzing MSN electronic messages and found that most people are connected by exactly 6.6 degrees. The explosion of social media provides another interesting opportunity to test the “six degrees of separation” hypothesis. Yahoo and Facebook recently teamed up to launch an experiment that harnesses Facebook’s 750 million users to determine how they are connected. While the results of the Facebook experiment are still pending, whether or not we are ... Continue reading →