Microsoft research proves, theory of “Six degrees of separation” applicable to Internet also
Those who may be wondering, “What is this Theory of Six degrees of separation ?”, please note, Six degrees of separation, is a famous theory which suggests, on average, every person on this world is connected to each other by just 6 steps. You may obtain a detailed explanation at Wiki, which says,
Six degrees of separation refers to the idea that, if a person is one step away from each person he or she knows and two steps away from each person who is known by one of the people he or she knows, then everyone is an average of six “steps” away from each person on Earth.
A recent research by Microsoft conducted over world wide net gives a boon to this idea. Jure Leskovec and Eric Horvitz, at Microsoft Research in Redmond Washington, have crunched through masses of data, logging a month’s worth of global ‘instant messaging’ conversations using Microsoft Messenger.
In total they tallied up a whopping 255 billion messages sent in the course of 30 billion conversations among 240 million people during June 2006.
Eric Horvitz has mentioned on his official company report that,
even on world wide net, 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