Six Degrees of Separation

How's it going guys? Hope you've had a nice week. Before stepping out in our main post just let me give you my update about the last one, our new favorite equation!!!… Did you try it to hit the the calculator? What's your lucky number? Well… all I'm gonna say mine is… 11.

Ok, moving on. Now let's take it old school… social networks. What? Another one of those? Like if you haven't heard enough from them already, nowadays they're flooded with information, communication, pictures, groups, links… man, is quite easy to have a headache from all of it. And funny enough, these internet networks are in diapers. Take note that I started the paragraph with 'old school'… what's so old about it? Well… let me play interesting for now and tell you about the very first (and original, I might add) social network.

Remember the days without a computer? Hard to believe? Even in those days people had their own 'social network', and sometimes they didn't know about it. I like to call this network as the 'Six degrees of separation' experiment. I know you might heard about it, and you may ask yourself… "Wait a minute, that's not a social network, get your sources together!" Just keep reading.

It turns out that "Six Degrees of Separation" (SDoS) is a theory suggesting that every single person on the planet is somehow 'connected' to any other person you can think of through six other people max. Let me put it this way… if you are a facebook user then you can be 'connected' with any other user through six (or less) other users who make a chain of friends out of themselves. This was first proposed in 1929 by Frigyes Karinthy (I told you it was old school!). It sounds like a nice coincidence, but… it is true?

If you explore this on the web, you're gonna find a lot of experiments. People from the MIT, IBM, sociologist, playwrights, all have done their own little experiments. I personally like one involving the postal service, where some random senders only know the recipient's name, occupation and general location. Their task was to make sure the package was delivered to the target via people they thought were most likely in touch with the recipient (their friends or family). All these experiments results are quite striking, since the average number of 'links' needed between persons was, indeed… 6… but why 6? Is some sort of magical number? Maybe. Does it mean anything? Maybe not. Anyway, experiments and research are in still in the works and maybe, sometime, we'll be able to know if this theory carries some sort of deeper meaning.

Can you imagine being potentially in touch with EVERYONE? And I mean EVERYONE. Every person you see on the streets, TV, movies, radio, people from China, Ethiopia, Sweden… wow… my mind explodes! You can do your own experiment on the web, just look your facebook friends or people following you on twitter. Even Hollywood took noticed of it and there's a movie with that very title (Will Smith's on it). Here's the trailer of the movie if you fancy watching it.

Honestly I think anything is possible, but if we wanna make contact with the one person first we gotta find the right six people to make the connection.