Facebook and six degrees of separation

Facebook seems like a rich and obvious testbed for the six-degrees theory. And lo and behold, someone developed a facebook application to determine degrees of separation among facebook users -- see the wikipedia entry for more; and I have added a widget to this page.

I am fascinated right now (for how long who knows) by facebook. Mainly because all of a sudden, various social networks that I have been part of in my peripatetic life are present, and in the present. It's like time has been flattened, rendered 2-d and it's all now. It's as if the various boxes that I have kept different networks of friends in, mainly sorted by time (and where I lived), which also maps to some extent to varied interests, have all been up-ended and they are all flowing together. It also makes for a kind of Wonderful Life moment, because there are a lot of relationships there, with most of the bridges intact or only slightly charred.

Facebook also makes the theory much more, well, present and experienced -- like the difference between seeing a picture of the Golden Gate bridge and seeing the bridge itself. I can feel the various overlapping networks.

I have just installed the facebook Six Degrees app, and I need to play around with it.

Of course, the criticisms of the six-degrees theory (see previous posts) all hold -- in this case, the universe of facebook users is a pretty strong filter. The network of social networks definitely reflects the class and power and other social structures of humanity -- but doesn't that make the theory that much more interesting? Where do social networks jump the class line or the color line or the national line? And those borders are not so hard and fast as before, and weakening all the time as new communication tools (and transportation, although that's old news now?) erode the walls. How the barriers, especially the color and national one, are becoming more and more permeable ("Yes we can!") would be an interesting phenom to map. So not just six-degrees now, but how the degrees are changing over time. The wikipedia entry says that maximum degree of separation is 12 (the average is just under six) -- presumably that maximum will decline over time as the facebook universe expands (or the world gets smaller and flatter as new communication technologies and labor migration and mobility spread).

jd