Microsoft research points to six degrees of separation

Last weekend I went to a party in London where I got talking to someone from Swindon. Out of curiosity I asked him if he knew somebody I went to university with in Bath, who was also from Swindon. Funnily enough, he did, and after talking to a few more strangers at this party I had met a number who come from the small country village I’m from, and one who had served me a few years ago in a bar in Bath.
 
I have always loved coincidences like this and have agreed for a while now with the idea that everyone in the world can be connected (through a friend of a friend of a friend) by six people. To my great pleasure I have found that Microsoft has just put this theory to the test – and found that it is broadly true.
 
A huge study of our electronic communication habits – 30 billion conversations between 180 million users of Windows Live Messenger – has found that we are all more closely connected then we might have thought.
 
Researchers looked at the minimum amount of people sending messages to each other it would take to connect 180 billion different pairs of users. The average length was found to be 6.6 steps.
 
Eric Horvitz, a researcher from Microsoft commented that: “People have had this suspicion that we are really close. But we are showing on a very large scale that this idea goes beyond folklore."