Those few of you who follow me on Twitter know that I’m trying out my new AT&T USBConnect card to connect my MacBook to the web while Brenda drives me to Cherryville to visit my folks. We are currently in the country, between Asheboro and Charlotte, and I suspect that I’m getting only slightly faster than dialup, and I’m pretty pleased at the moment. We’re in some big woods right now. It will speed up significantly when we get close to the 3G speeds in Charlotte — but I’ll be too car sick by then…
Anyway, I’m writing to share this very interesting post from Smart Mobs’ Roland Piquepaille.
According to Nature in ‘Six degrees of messaging,’ computer scientists at Microsoft Research Redmond lab have logged a full month of instant messengers using — logically — Microsoft Messenger. ‘The compressed dataset occupies 4.5 terabytes, composed from 1 billion conversations per day (150 gigabytes) over one month of logging,” according to the researchers. The dataset which was collected in June 2006 contains summaries of 30 billion conversations among 240 million people. And they were very surprised to find that the average number of jumps to get from one random user to another was 6.6.” This is very close to the old ’six degrees of separation’ idea which states that everyone on Earth is six ’steps’ away from anyone else. But read more…
Smart Mobs » Blog Archive » Six degrees of separation in instant messaging
Tags: warlick, education, mobile blogging, 6 Degrees of Separation
Any news on the possibility that they could find conversations somehow tied to Kevin Bacon within 6 degrees of separation.
I have Verizon broadband to connect in the car while hubby drives. I love it! Just one more way to feel connected!