How connected are we really?

[Tvtyrant]

A friend and I were talking about this earlier. If we say the average person has 300 friends (actually 300) on facebook, within four degrees of seperation the number exceeds the worlds population.

Somewhere within the third and fourth degree of seperation you reach the total number of people of facebook, but of course there has to be a considerable amount of overlapping friends.

I am trying to find the math for what chance you are connected to everyone on facebook by degree of seperation.

[DavidSh]

A friend and I were talking about this earlier. If we say the average person has 300 friends (actually 300) on facebook, within four degrees of seperation the number exceeds the worlds population.

Somewhere within the third and fourth degree of seperation you reach the total number of people of facebook, but of course there has to be a considerable amount of overlapping friends.

I am trying to find the math for what chance you are connected to everyone on facebook by degree of seperation.

Two years ago, Facebook went and calculated the actual connectivity statistics. Their paper says there are an average of 3.57 intermediate people between a random person on Facebook and a random other person on Facebook.

Calculating probabilities is another matter.

[Tvtyrant]

Two years ago, Facebook went and calculated the actual connectivity statistics. Their paper says there are an average of 3.57 intermediate people between a random person on Facebook and a random other person on Facebook.

Calculating probabilities is another matter.

Nice find, thanks!

Any idea if they posted the date for public consumption? It would be cool to see how much physical distance reduces connectivity.

[2D8HP]

I'm not, and have never been on Facebook, nor has my wife, my son's or most of my co-workers, my brother (who lives on the other side of the continent from me) says he is though.

[halfeye]

I don't do facebook.

I can probably reach anyone in the world in four or five links (through knowing someone famous, obviously).

I suspect most people can do something very similar.

[LordEntrails]

Yea, but doesn't Russia average 4.2 Facebook accounts for every Russian?

[halfeye]

Yea, but doesn't Russia average 4.2 Facebook accounts for every Russian?

That sounds totally legitimate,

Facebook is an arse, if the Russian state wants it, let them have it. If it's not the state, then the state will eventually (after or during the cleanup) pursue the crooks.

[Florian]

I suspect most people can do something very similar.

It´s not that hard, at least not on the business level. No need to use Facebook for it, just plain old networking, staying in touch with your primary contacts (trade fairs are mandatory affairs for this).
That said, there're some very eerie blind spots when it comes to this. It´s weird that I can get workable contacts in RU or PRC, but draw a blank when it comes to AU or NZ.

[Crow]

Yea, but doesn't Russia average 4.2 Facebook accounts for every Russian?

I have a Russian account, and I'm not even Russian.

[ve4grm]

I don't do facebook.

I can probably reach anyone in the world in four or five links (through knowing someone famous, obviously).

I suspect most people can do something very similar.

I'm two degrees of separation from Harrison Ford! I couldn't reach anyone through him or anything, though. I just have a friend who stood behind him in a mediocre submarine movie.

That's the thing, though. Many of these relationships are so vague and inconsequential, I doubt we should actually count them as "connected".

[S@tanicoaldo]

I hate facebook, mostly because it's about life events and people just post the good things.

I like twitter because it's more about ideas rather then life, I still use a unofficial account to post my REAL ideas and thoughts (Also to re-blog porn) but overall people seem more genuine(And kind of depressed) in twitter.

Tumblr is similar but has too much spam.

Instagram is cool and can be quite artistic, if you don't care about followers is great place to just post photos.

I don't use the other social media.

[Bartmanhomer]

I got over 4,000+ friends on Facebook. I know it hard to believe but I feel like that I want to cut off friends on Facebook.

[Jormengand]

The 3.57 figure doesn't surprise me because I guessed it would be about 3.5 based on a vaguely simple logical process:

First premise: You and the randomly-selected person are probably not in the same country. For example, I'm from the UK. If you choose another random person, they have a 0.86% chance to be from the UK. For comparison, that's about the same chance that if you choose someone at random, they'll be transgender. If you're from the USA, then there's about a 4.3% chance that your target is too. If you're from the People's Republic of China, then you're still only looking at an 18% chance - oh, and the USA and the PRC basically act as multiple countries for this purpose on the basis of how large they are.
Second premise: It probably takes about one and a half steps on average just to get into the right country. Essentially, either you know someone in the country in question, or you don't but you know someone who does. It's extremely unlikely you don't know anyone who knows someone from the country in question.
Third premise: It probably takes about two steps within the country to get to the right person: remember that you might have multiple potential entry points in the same country so this isn't identical to saying "Every pair of people in the same country has a mutual friend"
Conclusion: It probably takes about 1.5 steps to get to the right country and 2 steps to get to the right place in the country, for a total of 3.5 steps.

There's a lot of consideration that needs to be had for people who can be reached via means other than Facebook if you want to calculate how connected we really are, rather than connected just via Facebook. And there's consideration that's needed for what counts as a "Connection". I have no doubt that I'm connected to my boyfriend, who I met online on these very forums. But I wouldn't say that I'm really connected to the random forumites that I've talked to. So how connected we are really is a very different question to how connected we are on Facebook, or on the internet in general.

[AvatarVecna]

If you're wanting to collect data beyond just theoretical woolgathering, you might be able to analyze Bacon Numbers; if you assume that actors aren't "connected" with each other outside of working on films together, it could be an admittedly-kludgy way to get an idea of how quickly the total number of people increases the higher the Bacon Number gets - and Bacon Numbers have the added bonus that the actual numbers are kept up-to-date by a group of obsessive movie fans. Additionally, while I unfortunately don't remember the name of the similar concept, I recall hearing a story years ago that there was something similar in the scientific community to Bacon Numbers - that is to say, how distant you were via collaborative papers from one particularly prolific collaborative scientist. There's less people obsessing over scientist facts than actor facts, I think, but the subject matter means the data should still be usable...and it means that you have two separate sub-groups to analyze and compare. Thus, if there are 100 actors with a Bacon Number of 1, 500 actors with a Bacon Number of 2, 2500 actors with a Bacon Number of 3, 50 scientists with a Collab Number of 1, 250 scientists with a Collab Number of 2, and 1250 scientists with a Collab Number of 3, you could possibly put together a hypothesis that, within these communities, each additional degree of separation has five times as many individuals within it as the previous degree (with the exception of the first degree, since the only 0th degree in either case would be one person).

[Scarlet Knight]

Yea, but doesn't Russia average 4.2 Facebook accounts for every Russian?

You vill not discuss real vorld tings - Roland St. Petersburg

[Aedilred]

Yea, but doesn't Russia average 4.2 Facebook accounts for every Russian?

Obviously this is a joke, but the ratio of Russian(-registered) accounts to Russians is no higher than 0.3. Oerall Data on Facebook users by country is surprisingly hard to come by outside the top ten, but we do know it has fewer registered users than the UK (44,000,000).

Among the top ten, both the Philippines and Thailand have more than one account per user once eligibility is factored in (obviously, the minimum age requirement is often ignored). Thailand has still had a very high uptake notwithstanding possibly underage accounts, at 83% (the USA is at 74%). Turkey, the USA and Mexico all have more than 0.9 accounts per head of eligible population, which probably represents something close to legitimate saturation. Vietnam is also at 0.89 and Brazil at 0.85. The UK is some way behind with 0.81.

The remaining two big user bases are in the list principally through dint of their huge population and represent a rather lower proportion of the whole population: Indonesia at 0.67 and India at 0.25.

Thnigs may also be skewed by China which is estimated to have more than 50 million users but has nowhere near that in registered accounts, so presumably thos accounts are being registered elsewhere.

[DavidSh]

The collaboration numbers for scientists (originally mathematicians) are Erdos numbers, measuring distance to the late Paul Erdős.

[Goaty14]

Yea, but doesn't Russia average 4.2 Facebook accounts for every Russian?

Joke, but I could relate...

1: Main Account (The one with my actual name and stuff -- what employers check when I try and get a job)
2: Side Account (The one that I use for the random childish crap such as GitP, also the one I use for mah "bros")
3: Side-Side Account (The one that's for the childish crap that I don't want the people who see my childish crap to see)
4: School Account (because for some reason my college won't accept my main account)
0.2: Spam Account (The one that I redirect all of my spam to... Occasionally I log on to see 10,000+ emails in order to remind myself how "important" I really am (not))

[BWR]

I don't have a Facebook account. It never interested me, despite friends and family complaining that 'it's so hard to get hold of me' - as if picking up the phone or sending an email is hard.

[Vinyadan]

Yea, but doesn't Russia average 4.2 Facebook accounts for every Russian?

They're stocking up for the cold winter

[veti]

I can probably reach anyone in the world in four or five links (through knowing someone famous, obviously).

Maybe, but going through "famous" people like that is kinda cheating, to my mind. A "connection" should only count if the other person actually remembers you.

If we disqualify connections via anyone who has more than, say, 1000 Facebook friends, then how far could you get?

[Aedilred]

Joke, but I could relate...

1: Main Account (The one with my actual name and stuff -- what employers check when I try and get a job)
2: Side Account (The one that I use for the random childish crap such as GitP, also the one I use for mah "bros")
3: Side-Side Account (The one that's for the childish crap that I don't want the people who see my childish crap to see)
4: School Account (because for some reason my college won't accept my main account)
0.2: Spam Account (The one that I redirect all of my spam to... Occasionally I log on to see 10,000+ emails in order to remind myself how "important" I really am (not))

I'm pretty sure it's possible to do all of 1-3 from a single Facebook account, and 4 seems pretty idiosyncratic. If you spend a bit of time organising your contacts you can sort them into groups who only each see part of your profile, and by posting new content as visible (or invisible) to various groups you can manage what they see. It's a pain in the neck but probably not as much as managing multiple profiles.

I don't have a Facebook account. It never interested me, despite friends and family complaining that 'it's so hard to get hold of me' - as if picking up the phone or sending an email is hard.

I can see where they're coming from. You're putting yourself in the equivalent position to someone from 15 years ago who refused to use email and insisted on people contacting you by post.

Especially when organising events and meet-ups, it's so much easier if everyone involved is on Facebook; you just click to add them to the event and they get notifications and reminders automatically. If they're not, you have to contact them individually, reproduce all the information about the event, remember to chase them if they don't respond and factor them into bookings and so on, etc. Indeed, I might go so far as to say that managing a single non-Facebook attendee takes at least as much time and effort as managing all the Facebook attendees put together.

It's still not a massive amount of time, but relatively, it feels like it.

Regarding more general contact, a similar principle can apply if you're used to communicating with people via long-running group chats and they have to speak to you individually. There's also an element of reactive contact about Facebook: because people are posting updates or commenting on other people's, you have the opportunity to respond as seems naturally, rather than having to find some pretext to pick up the phone or send an email. I tend to feel if I'm going to call someone or email them I have to have something to say, and that puts me off doing it at all. That's less of a problem where FB is concerned.

Of course, if you don't want to be on it, you don't have to be. I don't like Facebook as a business at all and all other things being equal I would leave. But I can't deny that it makes a huge difference to convenience of communication and that's why I haven't.

[ve4grm]

I can see where they're coming from. You're putting yourself in the equivalent position to someone from 15 years ago who refused to use email and insisted on people contacting you by post.

Especially when organising events and meet-ups, it's so much easier if everyone involved is on Facebook; you just click to add them to the event and they get notifications and reminders automatically. If they're not, you have to contact them individually, reproduce all the information about the event, remember to chase them if they don't respond and factor them into bookings and so on, etc. Indeed, I might go so far as to say that managing a single non-Facebook attendee takes at least as much time and effort as managing all the Facebook attendees put together.

It's still not a massive amount of time, but relatively, it feels like it.

Regarding more general contact, a similar principle can apply if you're used to communicating with people via long-running group chats and they have to speak to you individually. There's also an element of reactive contact about Facebook: because people are posting updates or commenting on other people's, you have the opportunity to respond as seems naturally, rather than having to find some pretext to pick up the phone or send an email. I tend to feel if I'm going to call someone or email them I have to have something to say, and that puts me off doing it at all. That's less of a problem where FB is concerned.

Of course, if you don't want to be on it, you don't have to be. I don't like Facebook as a business at all and all other things being equal I would leave. But I can't deny that it makes a huge difference to convenience of communication and that's why I haven't.

Yeah, unfortunately nothing has deposed Facebook for centralized event planning yet. Which is disappointing, as FB event planning is kind of awful sometimes, but still the best we have.

This is why my general strategy for Facebook is:

- have an account
- never use it, never put anything on it
- if someone does something that involves me on Facebook, have it set up to email me so I can go check the thing
- proceed to not worry too much when data gets compromised, because I never stored data there.