Six Degrees Of Separation? Try 3.57, Facebook Says

It’s a common notion that the world is connected by no more than six degrees. Everyone is a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend of somebody.

Facebook says it’s even closer than that, at least among its users.

The average degrees of separation for Facebook’s 1.59 billion users is 3.57, the social networking giant said. In the United States, that number drops to 3.46.

The degrees of separation varies for each person. Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s number was 3.17. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s was just 2.92.

The theory of ”six degrees of separation was popularized in a 1990 play by the same name. It was eventually made into a movie starring Will Smith and Ian McKellen three years later.

Facebook said in a blog post on its research page that number is much smaller. And calculating it was no easy task.

A team of researchers used algorithms developed by scientists who had previously studied human connectivity and applied it to Facebook’s massive user base.

The numbers got large very quickly.

“Imagine a person with 100 friends,” the blog post said. “If each of his friends also has 100 friends, then the number of friends-of-friends will be 10,000. If each of those friends-of-friends also has 100 friends then the number of friends-of-friends-of-friends will be 1,000,000.”

• Read the full methodology and see your own degrees of separation here.