The journal Nature is reporting that Microsoft researchers have found that the theory of everyone in the world being separated by just six other people pretty much holds true based on an analysis of 255 billion messages sent by 240 million people in June 2006.
The researchers actually published their work this past June and plan to present it ithe World Wide Web Conference set for April in Beijing.
An abstract of the report reads in part: We find that the graph is well-connected and robust to node removal. We investigate on a planetary-scale the oft-cited report that people are separated by “six degrees of separation” and find that the average path length among Messenger users is 6.6. We also find that people tend to communicate more with each other when they have similar age, language, and location, and that cross-gender conversations are both more frequent and of longer duration than conversations with the same gender.
