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Comment by Amorymeltzer | Hacker News Reader

>Each person in the world (at least among the 1.59 billion people active on Facebook) is connected to every other person by an average of three and a half other people.

This is a big deal, and always a fascinating result, but the other 5.5 billion cannot be merely discounted. 1.6 billion is over 22% of the global population, which makes for a very good sample set, but it is definitely biased. I may be 3.3 degrees away from "everyone on Facebook" but that isn't everyone. Almost by definition, those 5.5 billion people not on Facebook should be harder to reach, requiring many more steps.

Results from Weibo would be an interesting comparison.

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to your point, imagine the bed-ridden mother of a tribesman of a remote village in Sub-Saharan Africa and you easily tack on 2 more degrees of separation (the tribesman who has infrequent contact with a nearby city and then his senior-aged mother).

We're considering connections analogus to Facebook friendships, not currently open lines of communication. The mother, having lived a long life, likely knows hundreds of people in the village and the next few over (several of whom have moved to a number of different cities, a few quite far), so her son doesn't automatically tack on a degree of separation.

Not the point.

All it takes is one real example and you add to everyone.

IE a remote mother who has had a child is an automatic + one.

A 13 year who's been born remote and has a child remotely is plus two.

I could imagine a child this age only having ever met village members somewhere creeping off to have a baby.

Facebook is cheating by averaging.

It's an average, not a maximum.

But that's cheating, isn't it? I'm quite sure the quote the article starts with that mentions six degrees means that that is the maximum.

To be realistic, too, the original "six degrees of separation" did not take into account this international context.

Yes it did. "Gondolier from Venice" is right there in the article.

> How connected is the world? ... we've crunched the Facebook friend graph and determined that the number is 3.57

Agreed. this statement is presumptuous and self-aggrandizing and just incorrect. They should re-word this sentence and its implication.

And yet right beneath that they say;

(at least among the 1.59 billion people active on Facebook)

that parenthetical is not enough for me

You must be fun at parties.

about as fun as i am here apparently

That last comment was hysterical. You can come to my party.

if it's in oakland i'll bring the 40

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