Four Degrees of Separation, Really

Authors:
Paolo Boldi;Sebastiano Vigna
Affiliations:
-;-
Venue:
ASONAM '12 Proceedings of the 2012 International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM 2012)
Year:
2012

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Abstract

We recently measured the average distance of users in the Facebook graph, spurring comments in the scientific community as well as in the general press ("Four Degrees of Separation"). A number of interesting criticisms have been made about the meaningfulness, methods and consequences of the experiment we performed. In this paper we want to discuss some methodological aspects that we deem important to underline in the form of answers to the questions we have read in newspapers, magazines, blogs, or heard from colleagues. We indulge in some reflections on the actual meaning of "average distance" and make a number of side observations showing that, yes, 3.74 "degrees of separation" are really few.