To celebrate its 12 years in the industry, the networking site sends every user a Friends Day video card. The average distance we observe is 4.57, corresponding to 3.57 intermediaries or “degrees of separation”.
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Today is “Friends Day”.
“We want to finish connecting everyone, we’re going to do it in partnership with governments and different companies all over the world”, Zuckerberg said during an event celebrating Facebook’s 12th anniversary. In a 2011 study, researchers at Cornell, Università degli Studi di Milano and Facebook found a magic number of 3.74, back when the site had just (just!) 721 million users.
That’s particularly impressive, given that there were many cries about the death of Facebook not too long ago, as it seemed to have lost its cool factor.
Anyone who is at least 13 years old was allowed to become a registered Facebook user starting from 2006. The task was “monumental”, according to the company, as “the number of people reached grows very quickly with the degree of separation”.
In a report released on its blog on Thursday, social network Facebook highlighted the fact that the “human social world” is steadily shrinking; with people having come much closer than the traditional “six degrees of separation”. “I am so grateful to Facebook for giving me the gift of friendship”, you might have said, wiping a single tear off your cheek as you thanked the good Lord above for the divine transformative powers of social media.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO, and Sheryl Sandberg’s, COO, degrees of separation numbers are 3.17 and 2.92, respectively. Actually, according to Facebook Research, pretty close: 3.57 degrees close.
Facebook was developed in a Harvard dormitory in 2004 and now has more than 1.5 billion users.
Facebook is inviting its users to join in on the party by recognizing it as Friends Day, allowing them to view personalized videos that include special moments with the user’s friends in a clip that can be shared, as well as new stickers for Messenger.
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Stanley Milgram, the social psychologist who conducted the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment, conducted an experiment in 1967 around the “small world problem”: how are two randomly selected people within the United States connected? Facebook users make up about 62 percent of American adults, but 72 percent of all internet users.
