Zuckerberg’s average degrees of separation is 3.17 and Sandberg’s is a low 2.92.
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Go ahead and mark Thursday down on your calendar as “Friends Day” – it coincides with the 12th anniversary of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg starting the social network in his Harvard University dorm room. So according to Facebook, depending on how you want to do the counting, the true number, referring to intermediaries or to links, is either 3.57 or 4.57 degrees of separation. During that time, it’s also made waves for everything from its ambitious efforts to bring billions of unconnected people onto the Internet to its testing of “massive-scale emotional contagion” – a 2012 experiment that manipulated users’ emotions without their knowledge.
Facebook has declared its 12th birthday “Friends Day”. The concept is similar to Six Degrees of Separation (or Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, if you prefer), except in the Facebook universe, we are a tighter-knit family. In 2011, researchers at Cornell, the Università degli Studi di Milano, and Facebook computed the average across the 721 million people using the site back then, and found that it was 3.74.
There are now 22,000 people in GirlCrew Facebook groups in more than 40 cities worldwide.
Well, at least among those of us with Facebook accounts – but findings from the Pew Research Centre previous year indicate that upwards of 72% adults are active online. This means you could be connected to even the most distant stranger, hunched over a computer in some far corner of the world, by fewer than four people.
Facebook says analyzing the data is not easy. “Now, with twice as many people using the site, we’ve grown more interconnected, thus shortening the distance between any two people in the world”.
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Visit Facebook’s research blog to see how many degrees of separation you are from the rest of Facebook’s population.
