6.6 Degrees of Separation

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Ever heard of the six degrees of Kevin Bacon game? According to this article, Microsoft conducted a study on it's MSN Messenger network and concluded that we are all, in fact, only 6.6 degrees separated from each other. It's an interesting example of your hard earned cash (attributed to Microsoft via advertising and, more commonly, Windows money) funneling odd corporate investigations. I'm willing to bet they're already salivating over ideas on how to put this new data to use. At any rate, the results of the investigation are also interesting to the average user I suppose. I guess I'm only 6.6 (although, they decided to round it up to 7) degrees away from Bill Gates or Steve Jobs.... I shudder to think about how close that puts me to George W. Bush...

"This is the first time a planetary-scale social network has been available to validate the well-known 'six-degrees of separation finding,'"

- Eric Horvitz of Microsoft and Jure Leskovec of Carnegie Mellon University, in a paper that was presented earlier this year at the WWW 2008 conference in Beijing. - quote taken from the above linked article: Everyone Really Is Just Six Degrees From Kevin Bacon, Microsoft Says by: Paul McDougall on InformationWeek