Microsoft researchers studied the addresses of 30bn instant messages sent during a single month in 2006.
Any two people on average are linked by seven or fewer acquaintances, they say….
One of the researchers on the Microsoft Messenger project, Eric Horvitz, said he had been shocked by the results.
“What we’re seeing suggests there may be a social connectivity constant for humanity,” he was quoted as saying by the Washington Post newspaper.
“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”….
For the purposes of the study, two people were considered to be acquaintances if they had sent one another an instant message.Examining the minimum chain lengths it would take to connect all the users in the database, they found the average length was 6.6 steps and that 78% of the pairs could be connected in seven links or fewer.
The idea of six degrees of separation was conceived by US academic Stanley Milgram….
I’ve long been familiar with this theory, and I find it interesting. Although this is not an area of expertise for me, my suspicion is that Microsoft’s analysis will hardly be the end of the discussion on how well this theory holds up.
Thanks, K B
No wonder Vista sucks. People in Redmond have been taking time reading 30 BILLION IMs rather than debugging… LOL
Simple high-school combinatorics. If we assume that each person has N friends on average it would take an enormous population to create links longer than 7 people. Given that the population of users is limited, the length of the maximum link also has to be limited…
It makes me feel warm and fuzzy that MSoft has stored these 30bn messages for traffic analysis. I wonder if they could replicate the results using data stored from other months or years.
Possibly they would be willing to analyze data stored by 3rd parties. This could be an exciting new business to offset decreasing OS sales.
#1 – Paddy-O
>>No wonder Vista sucks
Fuckin’ A right. Why are they dicking around with nonsense like this, when their flagship operating system is a bloated, dysfunctional failure?
I hope the guys fooling around with this IM silliness aren’t ones who could be working on making Windows 7 something people would actually want to use.
As said previously, this is simple math. Impressive maybe, but certainly not surprising.
Like the fact that is any group of 26 people (+/-, I don’t have the exact number), there a 50% chance of having 2 people who share the same birthday.
What could be more interesting is statistical results when you take not 2 people at random, but 2 people who really meet (be it in real life, on the phone, or on the web). 2 people who really meet have a higher chance to share some caracteristics ( same language, same interests, same place of living, …), with higher chances of a shorter acquaintances chain.
#3 – Christ – I wonder if they could replicate the results using data stored from other months or years.
They’ll just call NSA to get the data sets.
#4 – Ayatollah Mustardi – Why are they dicking around with nonsense like this…
Because there are corporations who are willing to pay premium for this and other data that MS can squeeze out of their users. They’re learning from Google.
Malcolm Gladwell gives a pretty thorough analysis of this phenomenon in his book The Tipping Point. It’s a pretty fascinating read.
Wow, Kevin Bacon must send millions of IM text messages every day.
#1 – Way to go jumping straight to Vista bashing. Too easy. Normal people don’t have a problem with Vista. Time to get over it, everyone.
#10 – Jerq
>>Normal people don’t have a problem with Vista.
That’s because “normal people” stick with XP, OS X, or Linux.
Everyone I know (including me, myself) who has suffered under Vista has had “a problem” with it.
Come on, Jerq. The best you can say about Vista is that if it’s carefully tweaked, it almost sorta, somewhat, kinda, works as well as XP. Once you figure out how to do all the stuff you knew how to do with XP, and which doesn’t do anything more in Vista.
That’s really something for 6 years of work, huh?
#14 – Mustard – >>Normal people don’t have a problem with Vista.
That’s because “normal people” stick with XP, OS X, or Linux.
lol
#11 – Actually, the best I can say about Vista is that my grandma can use it without any problems on the stock computer she bought out of Circuit City, without any tweaks.
I’m sure I’ll get flamed for this, but seriously? Vista post-SP1 is fine, especially after a year and a half of fixes and what not.
I think the real point here is that Vista (and whatever quality you may associate with it, whether real or what you’ve heard from “everyone”) has nothing to do with this article. Vista bashing is the easy way out in comments on this story, because there just has to be something bad you can say about Microsoft.
Spend some time getting Vista working right you Geeks.
#13 – Jerq
>>Vista post-SP1 is fine, especially after
>>a year and a half of fixes and what not.
I guess that means you don’t use it.
Glad to hear that granny can check e-mail using Vista (she could have done that with CP/M), but as an advance in operating system technology?
You can’t really be claiming that!?!?!? Tell me no!!
#15 – Mustard
I actually use Vista on three machines – two at home and one at work. The one at work is eve an x64 machine, and they all work just as well for me as XP, and are just as fast, and have features that I use every day that XP doesn’t have. For me, Vista makes sense. I’m also using a range of hardware, both certified for Vista and not certified for Vista. Again, this is my experience, but it’s an experience that I’ve heard from many people I know as well.
That said, if you feel that Vista isn’t right for you, don’t use it. You have that choice. You can use OS X, Linux, CP/M, DOS, FreeBSD, or whatever other OS meets your needs. I’m just tired of mindless Vista bashing from people who have never used it.
Just my two cents.