The world is a small place…and it just got a little bit smaller.
It started out with Six Degrees of Separation–a theory believing that two people could be connected through six individuals. But are we really separated by six degrees?
According to a team of scientists at Facebook and the University of Milan, the average number of ‘friends’ separating any two people in the world is now just 4.74.
Using Facebook’s 721 million users, researchers designed a set of algorithms to determine the distance between any two random people by calculating the number of sample paths among the website’s consumers.
“When considering even the most distant Facebook user in the Siberian tundra or the Peruvian rain forest” the company wrote, “a friend of your friend probably knows a friend of their friend.”
So collegiettes™, you’re now just 4.74 links away from a British bombshell in the UK, a surfer in Australia, or an Olsen twin.