Yahoo! Research Small World Experiment Wants to Prove Six Degrees of Separation

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If you recall the “six degrees of separation” concept, you might be wondering how exactly this will be proven. Yahoo! is currently running an experiment that will try to determine how effective social networking will be in proving we’re only six friends away from just about anyone in the world.

Yahoo! Labs is currently running a Facebook app that will try to get you connected with certain people around the world through the shortest possible route. This means that you might have a friend who knows a friend who knows some people connected with an individual halfway around the globe, or maybe someone who’s even a celebrity. Yahoo! is using Facebook to prove this concept, particularly with how popular the social network is.

The purpose of this study is to test a long-standing theory in sociology that everyone on Earth is connected together in a giant social network. In this experiment, participants called “Senders” forward messages to their Facebook friends in an attempt to reach a given “Target” individual, about whom they are given certain identifying information, in the shortest number of steps possible.

Participants to the program will be asked to approve the Yahoo! Small World Experiment Facebook app, which will then try to search for possible connections to the assigned Target individual. If no connection is automatically detected, then the user will have to choose among his contacts for a possible connection.

Of course, the system relies on the probability that your chosen contact will be, in some way, connected to the target. It’s currently limited to searching for possible connections among your friends, since the app will need authorization to access friend lists. The “six degrees” concept is probably more viable outside of the usual online social network (e.g., you might be able to find connections among friends who are not necessarily online).

SixDegrees.com is actually the precursor to the modern social network. And if you’re a fan of Kevin Bacon, there’s always SixDegrees.org. The concept is interesting, and we’re wondering what kind of information Yahoo! will eventually find out with this experiment (maybe that we at the TFTS team are only a few degrees apart from Kevin Bacon).