6 degrees of separation is now 3

It's 1:30am and I'm wide awake.  In case you care, it's probably because I drank espresso at 10:30pm.  Here I lay, in bed,  refusing to get up because  I know, if I open my Bedroom door, my adorable 5 month shi tzu will most likely wake up and take control of the house.  I'm sure I set that dysfunctional precedence of tip toeing around the dog after he goes to sleep. This after having 2 kids, now in college.  Lesson here...don't listen to anything I say.  Most of the time I don't know shit, and sometimes I bullshit.

I am here, laying in bed, eyes wide open in the dark, my husband snoring next to me.  I am left with 2 options...wake him up for a quickie or go on Facebook...You guessed right.

I am on FB stalking my friends pages, clicking on their friend's pages, looking at their pictures and comments.  It's a free for all.  Everyone of my friends will have 1 or 2 people that I have a mutual friend with.  A girl I went to middle school with, in a different town, whom now is living in another country, but somehow is  friends with someone in my current town,  a friend has a mutual friend with my husband's cousin's wife, to a mutual friend from another town of a parent of  a kid that my kids  went to high school with.  The list goes on. 

And although I have single child syndrome,  looks  like this circle of connections is not just happening in my world.  The web's top 5 five social media sites, did a study on a friend of a friend connection  proving that social media is less than 6 degrees of separation.  These sites averaged anywhere from 4 to 7 degrees of separation and while I'm no actuary, when I averaged out those numbers I got 4.2.  So where did I come up with 3 degrees of separation...

Posted on November 24th 2011
From ~ 6 Degrees of Separation? Now It's Only 3, Thanks to Facebook...

The argument is, everyone is linked to each other via friends, family, co-worker and acquaintances, you are somehow 6 people away from knowing someone. But new research has said that it may now be nearly half that at only 3.74 degrees

The experiment  used the social network data of 721 million members.  They were able to examine and crunch the data and conclude that social media had in fact, nearly slashed the 6 degree rule in half.

The Statistics
Although Facebook caps the amount of friends you can have to 5,000, they found that the median was only 100 friends or 0.000014% of Facebook's users.
99.6% of these 100 people were connected by 5 degrees and 92% were connected by 4 degrees.
The average distance between any two users was 3.74 degrees

So with this said...be careful what you post to social media sites.   Not just because of big brother but also your friend or friend of a friend's cousin.

T