Six degrees of separation
Encyclopedia
Six degrees of separation refers to the idea that everyone is on average approximately six steps away, by way of introduction, from any other person on Earth, so that a chain of, "a friend of a friend
" statements can be made, on average, to connect any two people in six steps or fewer. It was originally set out by Frigyes Karinthy
and popularized by a play written by John Guare
.
. These conjectures were expanded in 1929 by Hungarian
author Frigyes Karinthy
, who published a volume of short stories titled Everything is Different. One of these pieces was titled "Chains," or "Chain-Links." The story investigated in abstract, conceptual, and fictional terms many of the problems that would captivate future generations of mathematicians, sociologists, and physicists within the field of network theory. Due to technological advances in communications and travel, friendship networks could grow larger and span greater distances. In particular, Karinthy believed that the modern world was 'shrinking' due to this ever-increasing connectedness of human beings. He posited that despite great physical distances between the globe's individuals, the growing density of human networks made the actual social distance far smaller.
As a result of this hypothesis, Karinthy's characters believed that any two individuals could be connected through at most five acquaintances. In his story, the characters create a game out of this notion. He writes:
This idea both directly and indirectly influenced a great deal of early thought on social network
s. Karinthy has been regarded as the originator of the notion of six degrees of separation.
PhD dissertation under Ithiel de Sola Pool
. Mathematician Manfred Kochen, an Austrian who had been involved in Statist urban design, extrapolated these empirical results in a mathematical manuscript, Contacts and Influences, concluding that in a U.S.-sized population without social structure, "it is practically certain that any two individuals can contact one another by means of at least two intermediaries. In a [socially] structured population it is less likely but still seems probable. And perhaps for the whole world's population, probably only one more bridging individual should be needed." They subsequently constructed Monte Carlo
simulations based on Gurevich's data, which recognized that both weak and strong acquaintance links are needed to model social structure. The simulations, carried out on the relatively limited computers of 1973, were nonetheless able to predict that a more realistic three degrees of separation existed across the U.S. population, foreshadowing the findings of American psychologist Stanley Milgram
.
Milgram continued Gurevich's experiments in acquaintanceship networks at Harvard University
in Cambridge, U.S. Kochen and de Sola Pool's manuscript, Contacts and Influences, was conceived while both were working at the University of Paris
in the early 1950s, during a time when Milgram visited and collaborated in their research. Their unpublished manuscript circulated among academics for over 20 years before publication in 1978. It formally articulated the mechanics of social networks, and explored the mathematical consequences of these (including the degree of connectedness). The manuscript left many significant questions about networks unresolved, and one of these was the number of degrees of separation in actual social networks. Milgram took up the challenge on his return from Paris
, leading to the experiments reported in The Small World Problem in popular science journal Psychology Today
, with a more rigorous version of the paper appearing in Sociometry two years later. The Psychology Today article generated enormous publicity for the experiments, which are well known today, long after much of the formative work has been forgotten.
Milgram's article made famous his 1967 set of experiments to investigate de Sola Pool and Kochen's "small world problem." Mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot
, born in Warsaw
, growing up in Poland
then France
, was aware of the Statist rules of thumb, and was also a colleague of de Sola Pool, Kochen and Milgram at the University of Paris during the early 1950s (Kochen brought Mandelbrot to work at the Institute for Advanced Study and later IBM in the U.S.). This circle of researchers was fascinated by the interconnectedness and "social capital" of human networks. Milgram's study results showed that people in the United States
seemed to be connected by approximately three friendship links, on average, without speculating on global linkages; he never actually used the term "six degrees of separation." Since the Psychology Today article gave the experiments wide publicity, Milgram, Kochen, and Karinthy all had been incorrectly attributed as the origin of the notion of six degrees; the most likely popularizer of the term "six degrees of separation" would be John Guare
, who attributed the value 'six' to Marconi
.
, have been conducted to empirically measure this connectedness. The phrase "six degrees of separation" is often used as a synonym for the idea of the "small world" phenomenon.
However, detractors argue that Milgram's experiment did not demonstrate such a link, and the "six degrees" claim has been decried as an "academic urban myth". Also, the existence of isolated groups of humans, for example the Korubo
and other native Brazilian populations, would tend to invalidate the strictest interpretation of the hypothesis.
, attempted to recreate Milgram's experiment on the Internet, using an e-mail message as the "package" that needed to be delivered, with 48,000 senders and 19 targets (in 157 countries). Watts found that the average (though not maximum) number of intermediaries was around six.
A 2007 study by Jure Leskovec and Eric Horvitz
examined a data set of instant messages composed of 30 billion conversations among 240 million people. They found the average path length among Microsoft Messenger users to be 6.6 (some now call the theory, "the seven degrees of separation" because of this.).
It has been suggested by some commentators that interlocking networks of computer mediated lateral communication could diffuse single messages to all interested users worldwide as per the 6 degrees of separation principle via Information Routing Group
s, which are networks specifically designed to exploit this principle and lateral diffusion.
is currently testing the theory by distributing a picture of a Japanese man named Satoshi. The puzzle was originally a part of Mind Candy's Perplex City
, but it has since grown into its own project.
wrote a play in 1990 and later released a film in 1993 that popularized it. It is Guare's most widely-known work.
The play ruminates upon the idea that any two individuals are connected by at most five others. As one of the characters states:
Guare, in interviews, attributed his awareness of the "six degrees" to Marconi. Although this idea had been circulating in various forms for decades, it is Guare's piece that is most responsible for popularizing the phrase "six degrees of separation." Following Guare's lead, many future television and film sources would later incorporate the notion into their stories.
J. J. Abrams
, the executive producer of television series Six Degrees
and Lost
, played the role of Doug in the film adaptation of this play. Many of the play's themes are apparent in his television shows (see below).
" was invented as a play on the concept: the goal is to link any actor to Kevin Bacon
through no more than six connections, where two actors are connected if they have appeared in a movie or commercial together.
, a web site that builds on the popularity of the "small world phenomenon" to create a charitable social network and inspire giving to charities online. Bacon started the network with celebrities who are highlighting their favorite charities – including Kyra Sedgwick
(Natural Resources Defense Council
), Nicole Kidman
(UNIFEM
), Ashley Judd
(YouthAIDS), Bradley Whitford
and Jane Kaczmarek
(Clothes off Our Back), Dana Delany
(Scleroderma Research Foundation
), Robert Duvall
(Pro Mujer
), Rosie O'Donnell
(Rosie's For All Kids Foundation), and Jessica Simpson
(Operation Smile
) — and he encouraged everyone to be celebrities for their own causes by joining the Six Degrees movement.
"SixDegrees.org is about using the idea that we are all connected to accomplish something good," said Bacon. "It is my hope that Six Degrees will soon be something more than a game or a gimmick. It will also be a force for good, by bringing a social conscience to social networking." The game, 'Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon,' made the rounds of college campuses over the past decade and lived on to be a shorthand term for the small world phenomenon.
Bacon created SixDegrees.org in partnership with the nonprofit Network for Good
, AOL
, and Entertainment Weekly
. Through SixDegrees.org, which builds on Network for Good's giving system for donating to more than one million charities online and AOL's AIM Pages
social networking service, people can learn about and support the charities of celebrities or fundraise for their own favorite causes with their own friends and families. Bacon will match the charitable dollars raised by the top six non-celebrity fundraisers with grants of up to $10,000 each
Facebook
A Facebook
platform application
named "Six Degrees" was developed by Karl Bunyan, which calculates the degrees of separation between different people. It had over 5.8 million users, as seen from the group's page. The average separation for all users of the application is 5.73 degrees, whereas the maximum degree of separation is 12. The application has a "Search for Connections" window to input any name of a Facebook
user, to which it then shows the chain of connections. In June 2009, Bunyan shut down the application, presumably due to issues with Facebook's caching policy; specifically, the policy prohibited the storing of friend lists for more than 24 hours, which would have made the application inaccurate. A new version of the application became available at Six Degrees after Karl Bunyan gave permission to a group of developers led by Todd Chaffee to re-develop the application based on Facebook's revised policy on caching data.
The initial version of the application was built at a Facebook Developers Garage London hackathon with Mark Zuckerberg
in attendance.
Yahoo! Research Small World Experiment has been conducting an experiment and everyone with a Facebook account can take part in it. According to the research page this research has the potential of resolving the still unresolved theory of six degrees of separation.
Facebook's data team released two papers in November 2011 which document that amongst all facebook users at the time of research (721 million users with 69 billion friendship links) there is an average distance of 4.74. Probabilistic algorithms were applied on statistical metadata to verify the accuracy of the measurements. It was also found that 99.91% of facebook users were interconnected, forming a large connected component.
LinkedIn
The LinkedIn
professional networking site operates on the concept of how many steps you are away from a person you wish to communicate with. The site encourages you to pass messages to people in your network via the people in your 1st-degree connections list, who in turn pass it to their 1st-degree connections.
was an early social-networking website that existed from 1997 to 2001. It allowed users to list friends, family members and acquaintances, send messages and post bulletin board items to people in their first, second, and third degrees, and see their connection to any other user on the site. At its height it had approximately one million users.
Twitter
Users on Twitter can follow other users creating a network. According to a study of 5.2 billion such relationships by social media monitoring firm Sysomos
, the average distance on Twitter is 4.67. On average, about 50% of people on Twitter are only four steps away from each other, while nearly everyone is five steps away.
In another work, researchers have shown that the average distance of 1,500 random users in Twitter is 3.435. They calculated the distance between each pair of users using all the active users in Twitter.
. Erdős-Bacon number
s are a further extension of the same thinking.
Watts and Strogatz
showed that:
Average Path Length = (ln N / ln K) where N = total nodes and K = acquaintances per node. Thus if
N = 300,000,000 (90% US pop.) and K = 30 then Degrees of Separation = 19.5 / 3.4 = 5.7 and if
N = 6,000,000,000 (90% World pop.) and K = 30 then Degrees of Separation = 22.5 / 3.4 = 6.6.
(Assume 10% of population is too young to participate.)
Friend of a friend
Friend of a friend is a phrase used to refer to someone that one does not know well, literally, a friend of a friend.In some social sciences, the phrase is used as a half-joking shorthand for the fact that much of the information on which people act comes from distant sources and cannot be...
" statements can be made, on average, to connect any two people in six steps or fewer. It was originally set out by Frigyes Karinthy
Frigyes Karinthy
Frigyes Karinthy was a Hungarian author, playwright, poet, journalist, and translator. He was the first proponent of the six degrees of separation concept, in his 1929 short story, Chains . Karinthy remains one of the most popular Hungarian writers...
and popularized by a play written by John Guare
John Guare
John Guare is an American playwright. He is best known as the author of The House of Blue Leaves, Six Degrees of Separation, and Landscape of the Body...
.
Shrinking world
Statist theories on optimal design of cities, city traffic flows, neighborhoods and demographics were in vogue after World War IWorld War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
. These conjectures were expanded in 1929 by Hungarian
Hungary
Hungary , officially the Republic of Hungary , is a landlocked country in Central Europe. It is situated in the Carpathian Basin and is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine and Romania to the east, Serbia and Croatia to the south, Slovenia to the southwest and Austria to the west. The...
author Frigyes Karinthy
Frigyes Karinthy
Frigyes Karinthy was a Hungarian author, playwright, poet, journalist, and translator. He was the first proponent of the six degrees of separation concept, in his 1929 short story, Chains . Karinthy remains one of the most popular Hungarian writers...
, who published a volume of short stories titled Everything is Different. One of these pieces was titled "Chains," or "Chain-Links." The story investigated in abstract, conceptual, and fictional terms many of the problems that would captivate future generations of mathematicians, sociologists, and physicists within the field of network theory. Due to technological advances in communications and travel, friendship networks could grow larger and span greater distances. In particular, Karinthy believed that the modern world was 'shrinking' due to this ever-increasing connectedness of human beings. He posited that despite great physical distances between the globe's individuals, the growing density of human networks made the actual social distance far smaller.
As a result of this hypothesis, Karinthy's characters believed that any two individuals could be connected through at most five acquaintances. In his story, the characters create a game out of this notion. He writes:
A fascinating game grew out of this discussion. One of us suggested performing the following experiment to prove that the population of the Earth is closer together now than they have ever been before. We should select any person from the 1.5 billion inhabitants of the Earth—anyone, anywhere at all. He bet us that, using no more than five individuals, one of whom is a personal acquaintance, he could contact the selected individual using nothing except the network of personal acquaintances.
This idea both directly and indirectly influenced a great deal of early thought on social network
Social network
A social network is a social structure made up of individuals called "nodes", which are tied by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as friendship, kinship, common interest, financial exchange, dislike, sexual relationships, or relationships of beliefs, knowledge or prestige.Social...
s. Karinthy has been regarded as the originator of the notion of six degrees of separation.
Small world
Michael Gurevich conducted seminal work in his empirical study of the structure of social networks in his 1961 Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyMassachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...
PhD dissertation under Ithiel de Sola Pool
Ithiel de Sola Pool
Ithiel de Sola Pool was a revolutionary in the field of social sciences. Pool led groundbreaking research on technology and its effects on society. He coined the term "convergence" to describe the effect of various scientific innovations on society in a futuristic world...
. Mathematician Manfred Kochen, an Austrian who had been involved in Statist urban design, extrapolated these empirical results in a mathematical manuscript, Contacts and Influences, concluding that in a U.S.-sized population without social structure, "it is practically certain that any two individuals can contact one another by means of at least two intermediaries. In a [socially] structured population it is less likely but still seems probable. And perhaps for the whole world's population, probably only one more bridging individual should be needed." They subsequently constructed Monte Carlo
Monte Carlo method
Monte Carlo methods are a class of computational algorithms that rely on repeated random sampling to compute their results. Monte Carlo methods are often used in computer simulations of physical and mathematical systems...
simulations based on Gurevich's data, which recognized that both weak and strong acquaintance links are needed to model social structure. The simulations, carried out on the relatively limited computers of 1973, were nonetheless able to predict that a more realistic three degrees of separation existed across the U.S. population, foreshadowing the findings of American psychologist Stanley Milgram
Stanley Milgram
Stanley Milgram was an American social psychologist most notable for his controversial study known as the Milgram Experiment. The study was conducted in the 1960s during Milgram's professorship at Yale...
.
Milgram continued Gurevich's experiments in acquaintanceship networks at Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
in Cambridge, U.S. Kochen and de Sola Pool's manuscript, Contacts and Influences, was conceived while both were working at the University of Paris
University of Paris
The University of Paris was a university located in Paris, France and one of the earliest to be established in Europe. It was founded in the mid 12th century, and officially recognized as a university probably between 1160 and 1250...
in the early 1950s, during a time when Milgram visited and collaborated in their research. Their unpublished manuscript circulated among academics for over 20 years before publication in 1978. It formally articulated the mechanics of social networks, and explored the mathematical consequences of these (including the degree of connectedness). The manuscript left many significant questions about networks unresolved, and one of these was the number of degrees of separation in actual social networks. Milgram took up the challenge on his return from Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
, leading to the experiments reported in The Small World Problem in popular science journal Psychology Today
Psychology Today
Psychology Today is a bi-monthly magazine published in the United States. It is a psychology-based magazine about relationships, health, and related topics written for a mass audience of non-psychologists. Psychology Today was founded in 1967 and features articles on such topics as love,...
, with a more rigorous version of the paper appearing in Sociometry two years later. The Psychology Today article generated enormous publicity for the experiments, which are well known today, long after much of the formative work has been forgotten.
Milgram's article made famous his 1967 set of experiments to investigate de Sola Pool and Kochen's "small world problem." Mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot
Benoît Mandelbrot
Benoît B. Mandelbrot was a French American mathematician. Born in Poland, he moved to France with his family when he was a child...
, born in Warsaw
Warsaw
Warsaw is the capital and largest city of Poland. It is located on the Vistula River, roughly from the Baltic Sea and from the Carpathian Mountains. Its population in 2010 was estimated at 1,716,855 residents with a greater metropolitan area of 2,631,902 residents, making Warsaw the 10th most...
, growing up in Poland
Poland
Poland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...
then France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
, was aware of the Statist rules of thumb, and was also a colleague of de Sola Pool, Kochen and Milgram at the University of Paris during the early 1950s (Kochen brought Mandelbrot to work at the Institute for Advanced Study and later IBM in the U.S.). This circle of researchers was fascinated by the interconnectedness and "social capital" of human networks. Milgram's study results showed that people in the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
seemed to be connected by approximately three friendship links, on average, without speculating on global linkages; he never actually used the term "six degrees of separation." Since the Psychology Today article gave the experiments wide publicity, Milgram, Kochen, and Karinthy all had been incorrectly attributed as the origin of the notion of six degrees; the most likely popularizer of the term "six degrees of separation" would be John Guare
John Guare
John Guare is an American playwright. He is best known as the author of The House of Blue Leaves, Six Degrees of Separation, and Landscape of the Body...
, who attributed the value 'six' to Marconi
Guglielmo Marconi
Guglielmo Marconi was an Italian inventor, known as the father of long distance radio transmission and for his development of Marconi's law and a radio telegraph system. Marconi is often credited as the inventor of radio, and indeed he shared the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics with Karl Ferdinand...
.
Research
Several studies, such as Milgram's small world experimentSmall world experiment
The small world experiment comprised several experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram and other researchers examining the average path length for social networks of people in the United States. The research was groundbreaking in that it suggested that human society is a small world type network...
, have been conducted to empirically measure this connectedness. The phrase "six degrees of separation" is often used as a synonym for the idea of the "small world" phenomenon.
However, detractors argue that Milgram's experiment did not demonstrate such a link, and the "six degrees" claim has been decried as an "academic urban myth". Also, the existence of isolated groups of humans, for example the Korubo
Korubo
Korubo or Korubu is the name given to a tribe of indigenous people living in the Javari Valley, in the Western Amazon Basin. The group calls themselves 'Dslala', and in Portuguese they are referred to as caceteiros...
and other native Brazilian populations, would tend to invalidate the strictest interpretation of the hypothesis.
Computer networks
In 2001, Duncan Watts, a professor at Columbia UniversityColumbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
, attempted to recreate Milgram's experiment on the Internet, using an e-mail message as the "package" that needed to be delivered, with 48,000 senders and 19 targets (in 157 countries). Watts found that the average (though not maximum) number of intermediaries was around six.
A 2007 study by Jure Leskovec and Eric Horvitz
Eric Horvitz
Eric Horvitz is a Distinguished Scientist at Microsoft, where he serves as a research area manager within Microsoft Research. His research interests span theoretical and practical challenges with developing systems that perceive, learn, and reason...
examined a data set of instant messages composed of 30 billion conversations among 240 million people. They found the average path length among Microsoft Messenger users to be 6.6 (some now call the theory, "the seven degrees of separation" because of this.).
It has been suggested by some commentators that interlocking networks of computer mediated lateral communication could diffuse single messages to all interested users worldwide as per the 6 degrees of separation principle via Information Routing Group
Information Routing Group
An Information Routing Group is a component of social networks consisting of a semi-infinite set of similar interlocking and overlapping groups...
s, which are networks specifically designed to exploit this principle and lateral diffusion.
Find Satoshi
The UK-based game company Mind CandyMind Candy
Mind Candy is a British entertainment company, formed in 2003 by UK internet entrepreneur Michael Acton Smith, and based in Shoreditch, London, England...
is currently testing the theory by distributing a picture of a Japanese man named Satoshi. The puzzle was originally a part of Mind Candy's Perplex City
Perplex City
Perplex City was a long-term alternate reality game presented by Mind Candy, a London-based development team. The first "season" of the game had players looking for "The Receda Cube" , a priceless scientific and spiritual artifact to the people of a fictional metropolis known as "Perplex City",...
, but it has since grown into its own project.
An optimal algorithm to calculate degrees of separation in social networks
Bakhshandeh et al have addressed the search problem of identifying the degree of separation between two users in social networks such as Twitter. They have introduced new search techniques to provide optimal or near optimal solutions. The experiments are performed using Twitter, and they show an improvement of several orders of magnitude over greedy approaches. Their optimal algorithm finds an average degree of separation of 3.43 between two random Twitter users, requiring an average of only 67 requests for information over the Internet to Twitter. A near-optimal solution of length 3.88 can be found by making an average of 13.3 requests.Popularization
No longer limited strictly to academic or philosophical thinking, the notion of six degrees recently has become influential throughout popular culture. Further advances in communication technology—and particularly the Internet—have drawn great attention to social networks and human interconnectedness. As a result, many popular media sources have addressed the term. The following provide a brief outline of the ways such ideas have shaped popular culture.John Guare's Six Degrees of Separation
American playwright John GuareJohn Guare
John Guare is an American playwright. He is best known as the author of The House of Blue Leaves, Six Degrees of Separation, and Landscape of the Body...
wrote a play in 1990 and later released a film in 1993 that popularized it. It is Guare's most widely-known work.
The play ruminates upon the idea that any two individuals are connected by at most five others. As one of the characters states:
I read somewhere that everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people. Six degrees of separation between us and everyone else on this planet. The President of the United States, a gondolier in Venice, just fill in the names. I find it A) extremely comforting that we're so close, and B) like Chinese water tortureChinese water tortureChinese water torture is the popular name for a method of water torture in which water is slowly dripped onto a person's forehead, allegedly driving the restrained victim insane...
that we're so close because you have to find the right six people to make the right connection... I am bound to everyone on this planet by a trail of six people.
Guare, in interviews, attributed his awareness of the "six degrees" to Marconi. Although this idea had been circulating in various forms for decades, it is Guare's piece that is most responsible for popularizing the phrase "six degrees of separation." Following Guare's lead, many future television and film sources would later incorporate the notion into their stories.
J. J. Abrams
J. J. Abrams
Jeffrey Jacob "J. J." Abrams is an American film and television producer, screenwriter, director, actor, and composer. He wrote and produced feature films before co-creating the television series Felicity...
, the executive producer of television series Six Degrees
Six Degrees
Six Degrees is an American dramatic television series about six residents of New York City and their respective relationships and connections with one another, based on the idea of six degrees of separation....
and Lost
Lost (TV series)
Lost is an American television series that originally aired on ABC from September 22, 2004 to May 23, 2010, consisting of six seasons. Lost is a drama series that follows the survivors of the crash of a commercial passenger jet flying between Sydney and Los Angeles, on a mysterious tropical island...
, played the role of Doug in the film adaptation of this play. Many of the play's themes are apparent in his television shows (see below).
Kevin Bacon game
The game "Six Degrees of Kevin BaconSix Degrees of Kevin Bacon
Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon is a trivia game based on the concept of the small world phenomenon and rests on the assumption that any individual involved in the Hollywood, California film industry can be linked through his or her film roles to actor Kevin Bacon within six steps. The name of the game...
" was invented as a play on the concept: the goal is to link any actor to Kevin Bacon
Kevin Bacon
Kevin Norwood Bacon is an American film and theater actor whose notable roles include Animal House, Diner, Footloose, Flatliners, Wild Things, A Few Good Men, JFK, Apollo 13, Mystic River, The Woodsman, Trapped, Friday the 13th, Hollow Man, Tremors, Death Sentence, Frost/Nixon, Crazy, Stupid, Love....
through no more than six connections, where two actors are connected if they have appeared in a movie or commercial together.
SixDegrees.org
On January 18, 2007, Kevin Bacon launched SixDegrees.orgSixDegrees.org
SixDegrees.org is a website launched on January 18, 2007 by Kevin Bacon. SixDegrees builds on the popularity of the "small world phenomenon" to create a charitable social network.- History :...
, a web site that builds on the popularity of the "small world phenomenon" to create a charitable social network and inspire giving to charities online. Bacon started the network with celebrities who are highlighting their favorite charities – including Kyra Sedgwick
Kyra Sedgwick
Kyra Minturn Sedgwick is an American actress.Sedgwick is best known for her starring role as Deputy Chief Brenda Leigh Johnson on the TNT crime drama The Closer. Sedgwick's role in the series won her a Golden Globe Award in 2007 and an Emmy Award in 2010...
(Natural Resources Defense Council
Natural Resources Defense Council
The Natural Resources Defense Council is a New York City-based, non-profit, non-partisan international environmental advocacy group, with offices in Washington DC, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Beijing...
), Nicole Kidman
Nicole Kidman
Nicole Mary Kidman, AC is an American-born Australian actress, singer, film producer, spokesmodel, and humanitarian. After starring in a number of small Australian films and TV shows, Kidman's breakthrough was in the 1989 thriller Dead Calm...
(UNIFEM
UNIFEM
The United Nations Development Fund for Women, commonly known as UNIFEM was established in December 1976 originally as the Voluntary Fund for the United Nations Decade for Women in the International Women's Year. Its first director was Dr. Margaret Snyder, Ph.D...
), Ashley Judd
Ashley Judd
Ashley Judd is an American television and film actress, who has played lead roles in films including Ruby in Paradise, Kiss the Girls, Double Jeopardy, Where the Heart Is and High Crimes...
(YouthAIDS), Bradley Whitford
Bradley Whitford
Bradley Whitford is an American film and television actor. He is best known for his roles as Deputy White House Chief of Staff Josh Lyman on the NBC television drama The West Wing, as Danny Tripp on Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, as Dan Stark in the Fox police buddy-comedy The Good Guys, as...
and Jane Kaczmarek
Jane Kaczmarek
Jane Frances Kaczmarek is an American actress. She is best known for playing the character of Lois on the television series Malcolm in the Middle. Kaczmarek is a three-time Golden Globe and seven-time Emmy Award nominee...
(Clothes off Our Back), Dana Delany
Dana Delany
Dana Welles Delany is an American film, stage, and television actress, producer, host and health activist.After various roles in the early career, Delany garnered her first leading role in 1987 in the short-lived NBC sitcom Sweet Surrender and achieved wider fame in 1988–1991 as Colleen McMurphy...
(Scleroderma Research Foundation
Scleroderma Research Foundation
The Scleroderma Research Foundation is a non-profit, 501 organization based in San Francisco. Its mission is to find improved therapies and a cure for scleroderma by funding research and Scleroderma Centers of Excellence, which provide multi-specialty clinical care in dedicated facilities...
), Robert Duvall
Robert Duvall
Robert Selden Duvall is an American actor and director. He has won an Academy Award, two Emmy Awards, four Golden Globe Awards and a BAFTA over the course of his career....
(Pro Mujer
Pro Mujer
Pro Mujer is a 20-year-old women’s development and microfinance organization that provides poor women in Latin America with an integrated package of financial services, healthcare, and training to lift themselves and their families out of poverty...
), Rosie O'Donnell
Rosie O'Donnell
Roseann "Rosie" O'Donnell is an American stand-up comedian, actress, author and television personality. She has also been a magazine editor and continues to be a celebrity blogger, LGBT rights activist, television producer and collaborative partner in the LGBT family vacation company R Family...
(Rosie's For All Kids Foundation), and Jessica Simpson
Jessica Simpson
Jessica Ann Simpson is an American recording artist, actress, television personality, and fashion designer whose rise to fame began in 1999. Since that time, Simpson has achieved many recording milestones, starred in several television shows, movies, and commercials, launched a line of hair and...
(Operation Smile
Operation Smile
Operation Smile is a not-for-profit medical service organization based in Norfolk, Virginia , founded in 1982. A secular NGO, the children's medical charity provides cleft lip and palate repair surgeries to children worldwide, assists countries in reaching self-sufficiency with these surgeries, and...
) — and he encouraged everyone to be celebrities for their own causes by joining the Six Degrees movement.
"SixDegrees.org is about using the idea that we are all connected to accomplish something good," said Bacon. "It is my hope that Six Degrees will soon be something more than a game or a gimmick. It will also be a force for good, by bringing a social conscience to social networking." The game, 'Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon,' made the rounds of college campuses over the past decade and lived on to be a shorthand term for the small world phenomenon.
Bacon created SixDegrees.org in partnership with the nonprofit Network for Good
Network for Good
Network for Good is a website where users can donate to charities and search for volunteer opportunities.The website was founded in 2001 by America Online, Cisco Systems and Yahoo!.-Management:...
, AOL
AOL
AOL Inc. is an American global Internet services and media company. AOL is headquartered at 770 Broadway in New York. Founded in 1983 as Control Video Corporation, it has franchised its services to companies in several nations around the world or set up international versions of its services...
, and Entertainment Weekly
Entertainment Weekly
Entertainment Weekly is an American magazine, published by the Time division of Time Warner, that covers film, television, music, broadway theatre, books and popular culture...
. Through SixDegrees.org, which builds on Network for Good's giving system for donating to more than one million charities online and AOL's AIM Pages
AIM Pages
AIM Pages is a free service offered by AOL to anyone that has an AIM Screenname and is at least 13 years of age. It allows the user to create his or her own web page and share it with friends....
social networking service, people can learn about and support the charities of celebrities or fundraise for their own favorite causes with their own friends and families. Bacon will match the charitable dollars raised by the top six non-celebrity fundraisers with grants of up to $10,000 each
Facebook
Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...
platform application
Application software
Application software, also known as an application or an "app", is computer software designed to help the user to perform specific tasks. Examples include enterprise software, accounting software, office suites, graphics software and media players. Many application programs deal principally with...
named "Six Degrees" was developed by Karl Bunyan, which calculates the degrees of separation between different people. It had over 5.8 million users, as seen from the group's page. The average separation for all users of the application is 5.73 degrees, whereas the maximum degree of separation is 12. The application has a "Search for Connections" window to input any name of a Facebook
Facebook
Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...
user, to which it then shows the chain of connections. In June 2009, Bunyan shut down the application, presumably due to issues with Facebook's caching policy; specifically, the policy prohibited the storing of friend lists for more than 24 hours, which would have made the application inaccurate. A new version of the application became available at Six Degrees after Karl Bunyan gave permission to a group of developers led by Todd Chaffee to re-develop the application based on Facebook's revised policy on caching data.
The initial version of the application was built at a Facebook Developers Garage London hackathon with Mark Zuckerberg
Mark Zuckerberg
Mark Elliot Zuckerberg is an American computer programmer and Internet entrepreneur. He is best known for co-creating the social networking site Facebook, of which he is chief executive and president...
in attendance.
Yahoo! Research Small World Experiment has been conducting an experiment and everyone with a Facebook account can take part in it. According to the research page this research has the potential of resolving the still unresolved theory of six degrees of separation.
Facebook's data team released two papers in November 2011 which document that amongst all facebook users at the time of research (721 million users with 69 billion friendship links) there is an average distance of 4.74. Probabilistic algorithms were applied on statistical metadata to verify the accuracy of the measurements. It was also found that 99.91% of facebook users were interconnected, forming a large connected component.
LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a business-related social networking site. Founded in December 2002 and launched in May 2003, it is mainly used for professional networking. , LinkedIn reports more than 120 million registered users in more than 200 countries and territories. The site is available in English, French,...
professional networking site operates on the concept of how many steps you are away from a person you wish to communicate with. The site encourages you to pass messages to people in your network via the people in your 1st-degree connections list, who in turn pass it to their 1st-degree connections.
Nootrol
The Nootrol.com Supply Chain carbon accounting site again applies the concepts of 6 degrees of separation to measure and manage the carbon embodied within any supply chain. Nootrol does not disclose the number of links between any two businesses but the idea that the Six Degrees of separation could actually form the basis for tackling the climate change issue is interesting and probably the first application of the concept to solve a real world problem.SixDegrees.com
SixDegrees.comSixDegrees.com
SixDegrees.com was a social network service website that lasted from 1997 to 2001 and was based on the Web of Contacts model of social networking. It was named after the six degrees of separation concept and allowed users to list friends, family members and acquaintances both on the site and...
was an early social-networking website that existed from 1997 to 2001. It allowed users to list friends, family members and acquaintances, send messages and post bulletin board items to people in their first, second, and third degrees, and see their connection to any other user on the site. At its height it had approximately one million users.
Sysomos
Sysomos Inc. is a Toronto-based social media analytics company.The company uses content of social media sites including blogs, forums and Twitter to create a real-time picture on how products, people, and brands are covered in those media sites. Unlike other similar services, it also attempts to...
, the average distance on Twitter is 4.67. On average, about 50% of people on Twitter are only four steps away from each other, while nearly everyone is five steps away.
In another work, researchers have shown that the average distance of 1,500 random users in Twitter is 3.435. They calculated the distance between each pair of users using all the active users in Twitter.
Mathematics
Mathematicians use an analogous notion of collaboration distance: two persons are linked if they are coauthors of an article. The collaboration distance with mathematician Paul Erdős is called the Erdős numberErdos number
The Erdős number describes the "collaborative distance" between a person and mathematician Paul Erdős, as measured by authorship of mathematical papers.The same principle has been proposed for other eminent persons in other fields.- Overview :...
. Erdős-Bacon number
Erdos-Bacon number
A person's Erdős–Bacon number is the sum of one's Erdős number—which measures the "collaborative distance" in authoring mathematical papers between that person and Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős—and one's Bacon number—which represents the number of links, through roles in...
s are a further extension of the same thinking.
Watts and Strogatz
Watts and Strogatz model
The Watts and Strogatz model is a random graph generation model that produces graphs with small-world properties, including short average path lengths and high clustering. It was proposed by Duncan J. Watts and Steven Strogatz in their joint 1998 Nature paper...
showed that:
Average Path Length = (ln N / ln K) where N = total nodes and K = acquaintances per node. Thus if
N = 300,000,000 (90% US pop.) and K = 30 then Degrees of Separation = 19.5 / 3.4 = 5.7 and if
N = 6,000,000,000 (90% World pop.) and K = 30 then Degrees of Separation = 22.5 / 3.4 = 6.6.
(Assume 10% of population is too young to participate.)
Psychology
A 2007 article published in The Industrial-Organizational Psychologist, by Jesse S. Michel from Michigan State University, applied Stanley Milgram’s small world phenomenon (i.e., “small world problem”) to the field of I-O psychology through co-author publication linkages. Following six criteria, Scott Highhouse (Bowling Green State University professor and fellow of the Society of Industrial and Organizational Psychology) was chosen as the target. Co-author publication linkages were determined for (1) top authors within the I-O community, (2) quasi-random faculty members of highly productive I-O programs in North America, and (3) publication trends of the target. Results suggest that the small world phenomenon is alive and well with mean linkages of 3.00 to top authors, mean linkages of 2.50 to quasi-random faculty members, and a relatively broad and non-repetitive set of co-author linkages for the target. The author then provided a series of implications and suggestions for future research.Film and television
- Six Degrees of SeparationSix Degrees of Separation (film)Six Degrees of Separation is a 1990 play written by John Guare that premiered at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, Lincoln Center on May 16, 1990, directed by Jerry Zaks and starring Stockard Channing...
is a 1993 film drama featuring Will SmithWill SmithWillard Christopher "Will" Smith, Jr. , also known by his stage name The Fresh Prince, is an American actor, producer, and rapper. He has enjoyed success in television, film and music. In April 2007, Newsweek called him the most powerful actor in Hollywood...
, Donald Sutherland and Stockard Channing, about a fast-talking young man (Smith's entry into mainstream cinema) who, out of the blue, prevails upon the good graces of a nonplussed NYC couple in the wake of his supposed mugging in Central ParkCentral ParkCentral Park is a public park in the center of Manhattan in New York City, United States. The park initially opened in 1857, on of city-owned land. In 1858, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux won a design competition to improve and expand the park with a plan they entitled the Greensward Plan...
, claiming to be Sidney PoitierSidney PoitierSir Sidney Poitier, KBE is a Bahamian American actor, film director, author, and diplomat.In 1963, Poitier became the first black person to win an Academy Award for Best Actor for his role in Lilies of the Field...
's son and masquerading flamboyantly as a close friend and classmate of their HarvardHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
-enrolled kids, and in the process upsetting their shallow uppercrust world. - Six DegreesSix DegreesSix Degrees is an American dramatic television series about six residents of New York City and their respective relationships and connections with one another, based on the idea of six degrees of separation....
is a 2006 television series on ABCAmerican Broadcasting CompanyThe American Broadcasting Company is an American commercial broadcasting television network. Created in 1943 from the former NBC Blue radio network, ABC is owned by The Walt Disney Company and is part of Disney-ABC Television Group. Its first broadcast on television was in 1948...
in the US. The show details the experiences of six New Yorkers who go about their lives without realizing they are affecting each other, and gradually meet one another.
- The television program LostLost (TV series)Lost is an American television series that originally aired on ABC from September 22, 2004 to May 23, 2010, consisting of six seasons. Lost is a drama series that follows the survivors of the crash of a commercial passenger jet flying between Sydney and Los Angeles, on a mysterious tropical island...
also explores the idea of six degrees of separation, as almost all the characters have randomly met each other before the crash or someone the other characters know. For example, Jack'sJack ShephardDr. Jack Shephard is a fictional character and protagonist of the ABC television series Lost played by Matthew Fox. Lost follows the journey of the survivors of Oceanic Airlines flight 815 on a mysterious island and their attempts to survive and escape, slowly uncovering more of the much broader...
father, Christian, went to AustraliaAustraliaAustralia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...
with Ana LuciaAna Lucia CortezAna Lucia Cortez is a fictional character on the ABC television series Lost, played by Michelle Rodriguez. Ana Lucia made her first appearance as a guest star in the first season finale, and became part of the main cast for season two. After Oceanic Flight 815 splits in mid-air, the tail section...
and later had drinks with Sawyer. On the Season 2 Bonus Material DVDDVDA DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....
, there is a special feature called "The Lost Connections". It has an intro that mentions Karinthy Frigyes and explains the theory, showing photographs of random people and proposing that "you or someone you know" probably knows them. The actual feature is an animated interface of video clips of character connections, the frames of the videos connected by multi-colored wires. - Lonely Planet Six DegreesLonely Planet Six DegreesLonely Planet Six Degrees is Lonely Planet's flagship travel show, hosted by Asha Gill and Toby Amies. The show is centered on unique people living within locations, rather than simply famous tourist attractions, with one of the hosts meeting with one contact in a specific country, who in turn...
is a TV travel show that uses the "six degrees of separation" concept: the hosts, Asha GillAsha GillAsha Anand Gill is a Malaysia-based model, television host, deejay, veejay, writer, producer, film director, and women's rights activist...
and Toby AmiesToby AmiesToby Amies is a broadcaster, filmmaker and photographer, best known for his work on Radio4, MTV UK's Alternative Nation, FilmFour, Lonely Planet Six Degrees and The Rough Guides. Toby specialises in making programmes about art, music and travel, with a special emphasis on fringe culture and...
, explore various cities through its people, by following certain personalities of the city around and being introduced by them to other personalities. - The movie My Date with DrewMy Date with DrewMy Date with Drew is a 2004 documentary film starring Brian Herzlinger. Since he first saw E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial as a child, he has had a crush on its star Drew Barrymore. Now, more than 20 years later, Herzlinger combines his passions for filmmaking and Drew Barrymore to document his quest...
revolves around average JoeAverage JoeAverage Joe is an American reality television show broadcast on the NBC beginning in 2003. There were a total of four seasons, the first two following the original show premise, and the last two bringing back contestants from prior seasons.-Show Premise:...
Brian HerzlingerBrian HerzlingerBrian Scott Herzlinger is an American film director who directed and starred in My Date with Drew, a documentary released in 2005...
getting a date with Drew BarrymoreDrew BarrymoreDrew Blyth Barrymore is an American actress, film director, screenwriter, producer and model. She is a member of the Barrymore family of American actors and granddaughter of John Barrymore. She first appeared in an advertisement when she was 11 months old. Barrymore made her film debut in Altered...
. To get in contact with her he uses a lot of determination and the Six Degrees of Separation. - The Oscar-winning film, Babel, is based on the concept of Six Degrees of Separation. The lives of all of the characters were intimately intertwined, although they did not know each other and lived thousands of miles from each other.
- The show The L WordThe L WordThe L Word is an American co-production television drama series originally shown on Showtime portraying the lives of a group of lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people and their friends, family and lovers in the trendy Greater Los Angeles, California city of West Hollywood...
, although not directly mentioning six degrees of separation, deals with this theme in "the chart" in which all characters are linked via sexual events to others. Alice PieszeckiAlice PieszeckiAlice Pieszecki is a fictional character on the Showtime television network series The L Word, shown nationally in the United States. She is played by American actress Leisha Hailey. Alice lives in Los Angeles, California, and mostly hangs out in West Hollywood...
(played by Leisha HaileyLeisha HaileyLeisha Hailey is an American actress and musician most widely known for playing Alice Pieszecki in the Showtime Networks production The L Word...
) is the originator of this concept, and indeed the initial chart is shown in her home, on a whiteboardWhiteboardA whiteboard is a name for any glossy, usually white surface for nonpermanent markings. Whiteboards are analogous to chalkboards, allowing rapid marking and erasing of markings on their surface...
before eventually being translated to the InternetInternetThe Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
. - Six Degrees of Martina McBrideSix Degrees of Martina McBride"Six Degrees of Martina McBride" is a TV pilot where six aspiring country singers from America's smallest towns try to connect themselves to Martina McBride in under six points of human connection...
was a television pilotTelevision pilotA "television pilot" is a standalone episode of a television series that is used to sell the show to a television network. At the time of its inception, the pilot is meant to be the "testing ground" to see if a series will be possibly desired and successful and therefore a test episode of an...
where six aspiring country singers from America's smallest towns try to connect themselves to Martina McBrideMartina McBrideMartina McBride is an American country music singer and songwriter. McBride has been called the "Céline Dion of Country Music" for her big-voiced ballads and soprano range....
in under six points of human connection. Those that make it from "Nowhere to NashvilleNashville, TennesseeNashville is the capital of the U.S. state of Tennessee and the county seat of Davidson County. It is located on the Cumberland River in Davidson County, in the north-central part of the state. The city is a center for the health care, publishing, banking and transportation industries, and is home...
to New York," get a shot at a studio session with Martina McBride and a record deal with SONY BMG. - In CSI: New York first season Rain Detective Mac Taylor mentions Six Degrees of Separation. Heard at approx 35:00.
- The WoestijnvisWoestijnvisWoestijnvis is an independent Flemish television production company.-History:The name of the company refers to a famous mistake of a quiz-candidate in the Flemish version of Wheel of Fortune: the remaining letters were W . . ST . . NV . S and somebody answered "WOESTIJNVIS" , the correct answer...
production Man Bijt Hond, broadcast on FlemishFlandersFlanders is the community of the Flemings but also one of the institutions in Belgium, and a geographical region located in parts of present-day Belgium, France and the Netherlands. "Flanders" can also refer to the northern part of Belgium that contains Brussels, Bruges, Ghent and Antwerp...
TV, features a weekly section Dossier Costers, in which a worldwide event from the past week is linked to Gustaaf Costers, an ordinary Flemish citizen, in 6 steps. - One of the achievements in the video game Brütal LegendBrütal LegendBrütal Legend is an action-adventure/real-time strategy game created by Double Fine Productions and published by Electronic Arts for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. The game was released during October 2009 in North America and Europe...
is called "Six Degrees of Schafer", after the concept and Tim SchaferTim SchaferTimothy Schafer is an American computer game designer. He founded Double Fine Productions in January 2000, after having spent over a decade at LucasArts...
, who was presumably in the handful of players to have the achievement as of the game's release. A player can only obtain this achievement by playing online with someone who already has it, further paralleling it to the concept. - Connected: The Power of Six Degrees is a 2008 television episode on the Science Channel in the US and abroad.
Other
- In the web experiment 6 Degrees of Sesame an artist linked his actress girlfriend to Sesame StreetSesame StreetSesame Street has undergone significant changes in its history. According to writer Michael Davis, by the mid-1970s the show had become "an American institution". The cast and crew expanded during this time, including the hiring of women in the crew and additional minorities in the cast. The...
founder Joan Ganz CooneyJoan Ganz CooneyJoan Ganz Cooney is an American television producer. She is one of the founders of the Children's Television Workshop , the organization famous for the creation of the children's television show Sesame Street. Cooney received her B.A...
. - The No DoubtNo DoubtNo Doubt is an American rock band from Anaheim, California that formed in 1986. The ska-pop sound of their first album No Doubt , failed to make an impact...
song Full Circle has a central theme dealing with six degrees of separation. - Stuart MaconieStuart MaconieStuart Maconie is an English radio DJ and television presenter, writer, journalist, and critic working in the field of of pop music and popular culture. He is currently a presenter on BBC 6 Music, where he hosts an afternoon show five times a week , alongside Mark Radcliffe, called the Radcliffe...
on his BBC Radio 2BBC Radio 2BBC Radio 2 is one of the BBC's national radio stations and the most popular station in the United Kingdom. Much of its daytime playlist-based programming is best described as Adult Contemporary or AOR, although the station is also noted for its specialist broadcasting of other musical genres...
show on Saturday afternoons has a Six Degrees of Separation quiz in which listeners have to identify the links between six songs/artists. Song/Artist one links to song/artist two which links to three and so on. The winner gets a 'celebrity shopping basket' consisting of a book, a music CD and a DVD chosen by that week's guest celebrity. - Terrorizer magazine features a variation upon the aforementioned "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" with their monthly column "Six Degrees of Shane EmburyShane EmburyShane Embury is a British bassist and member of Napalm Death.-Napalm Death:Embury is the only member left who has been in the band since the Scum tour, replacing previous bassist Jim Whitley in 1987...
", the task being to link the Napalm DeathNapalm DeathNapalm Death are a death metal band formed in Birmingham, England in 1981. While none of its original members remain in the group, the lineup of vocalist Mark "Barney" Greenway, bassist Shane Embury, guitarist Mitch Harris and drummer Danny Herrera has remained consistent for most of the band's ...
bassist to a given musician in six steps or fewer. - Popular Belfast-based radio show on Blast Xtra "G.Y.T.O (Get Your Tuesday On)" hosted by Eamonn Rodgers every week 7pm-9pm has a regular feature named 'Blast Connection' which links the word "Blast" to a song title using the six degrees of separation.
See also
- Erdős numberErdos numberThe Erdős number describes the "collaborative distance" between a person and mathematician Paul Erdős, as measured by authorship of mathematical papers.The same principle has been proposed for other eminent persons in other fields.- Overview :...
- Erdős–Bacon number
- Hyperlink CinemaHyperlink cinemaHyperlink cinema is a term coined by author Alissa Quart, who used the term in her review of the film Happy Endings for the film journal Film Comment in 2005. Film critic Roger Ebert popularized the term when reviewing the film Syriana in 2005...
- Jewish geographyJewish GeographyJewish geography is a popular "game" sometimes played when Jews meet each other for the first time and try to identify people they know in common...
- Professional network serviceProfessional network serviceA professional network service is a type of social network service that is focused solely on interactions and relationships of a business nature rather than including personal, nonbusiness interactions.Notable examples include LinkedIn, Viadeo, XING and Wisestep.com.-See also:* Business...
- Shusaku number
- Six Degrees of Kevin BaconSix Degrees of Kevin BaconSix Degrees of Kevin Bacon is a trivia game based on the concept of the small world phenomenon and rests on the assumption that any individual involved in the Hollywood, California film industry can be linked through his or her film roles to actor Kevin Bacon within six steps. The name of the game...
- SixDegrees.orgSixDegrees.orgSixDegrees.org is a website launched on January 18, 2007 by Kevin Bacon. SixDegrees builds on the popularity of the "small world phenomenon" to create a charitable social network.- History :...
- Small world phenomenon
- Social networkSocial networkA social network is a social structure made up of individuals called "nodes", which are tied by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as friendship, kinship, common interest, financial exchange, dislike, sexual relationships, or relationships of beliefs, knowledge or prestige.Social...
- The Game (mind game)The Game (mind game)The Game is a mental game where the objective is to avoid thinking about The Game itself. Thinking about The Game constitutes a loss, which, according to the rules of The Game, must be announced each time it occurs. It is impossible to win most versions of The Game; players can only attempt to...
- The Tipping PointThe Tipping PointThe Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference is a book by Malcolm Gladwell, first published by Little Brown in 2000....
by Malcolm Gladwell
External links
- Six Degrees - The new version of the Facebook application originally built by Karl Bunyan.
- The 6th Degree - A social networking site that uses the Six degrees of separation to find people that are missing or wanted.
- Facebook revised policy on caching data - Facebook's revised policy removing the 24 hour limit on caching of user data.
- Facebook Developers Garage London hackathon - The June 2010 Facebook Developers Garage London hackathon at which the new version of the Six Degrees Facebook application was built.
- Find The Bacon - is a site built for finding the connections between actors and the movies they have played in.
- whocanfindme - the quest- Off- and online contest based on the six degrees of separation principle
- Six Degrees Campaign, a climate justice campaign initiated by Friends of the Earth Brisbane based on the principles of small world theory.
- "E-mail Study Corroborates Six Degrees of Separation", a 2003 Scientific AmericanScientific AmericanScientific American is a popular science magazine. It is notable for its long history of presenting science monthly to an educated but not necessarily scientific public, through its careful attention to the clarity of its text as well as the quality of its specially commissioned color graphics...
article about a study conducted at Columbia UniversityColumbia UniversityColumbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
. - Could it be a big world? - 2001, Judith KleinfeldJudith KleinfeldJudith Smilg Kleinfeld is a professor of Psychology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and co-chairs the Northern Studies department.A controversial academician, her most well known works are the ones criticizing studies on alleged discrimination in educational settings. Her analyzed the...
, University of Alaska Fairbanks - Pumpthemusic Oracle- The 6 degrees theory applied to the musical universe
- The Oracle of Bacon - The 6 degrees theory applied to movies and TV, by Dan Ward - Journal article published by Defense Acquisition University, applies principles from Duncan Watts' book Six Degrees to technology innovation and scientific research.
- http://www.steve-jackson.net/six_degrees/index.html
- Measuring Degrees of Separation - Demonstrates how a small sample size can be used to accurately measure the degrees of separation
- Using The Six Degrees Of Separation concept along with Social Networking to find my birthparents - An adoptee conducts an experiment based on the 6 degrees of separation and the power of social networking, his goal: to get the word out about his birth to as many people as possible until he finds people with answers to his questions.