Anyone Can Be Found on Social Media in 12 Hours

In 1967, the American social psychologist Stanley Milgram sent out 160 packages to randomly chosen individuals in the U.S., asking them to forward them to a single individual living in Boston. The task included a simple rule: The recipients could only send each parcel on to somebody they knew on a first-name basis.

To his surprise, Milgram found that the first package arrived at its destination via only two people. On average, he found that the parcels reached their destination via five pairs of hands, which amounts to 6 degrees of separation.

Milgram’s work has since been repeated on various social networks. For example, Microsoft says people on its Messenger network are separated by 6.6 degrees of freedom and Facebook claims its members are separated by only 4 degrees of separation. Read more...