[ed. New study of 721 million Facebook users says there may be only 4.74 degrees of separation between you and George Clooney.]
“We are close, in a sense, to people who don’t necessarily like us, sympathize with us or have anything in common with us,” Dr. Kleinberg said. “It’s the weak ties that make the world small.”
Still, he noted that such ties were hardly meaningless. “We should ask what things spread well on weak ties,” he said. “News spreads well on weak ties. Those people I met on vacation, if they send me some cool news, I might send that to my friends. If they send me something about a protest movement, I might not.”
Matthew O. Jackson, an economist at Stanford who studies social networks, raised questions about the bias built into a study based on random samples. He said the study confirmed Facebook’s success in being where millions of people communicate. “It’s more evidence that they’ve been enormously successful at connecting a large number of people very well,” he said.
The research underscores the growing power of the emerging science of social networks, in which scientists study the ways people interact by crunching gigantic sets of Internet data.
“These social network tools provide individuals with tremendous reach,” said Dr. Horvitz, the Microsoft researcher. “People can share ideas with only a few jumps to a large portion of the world’s population and with even fewer steps to the entire population of a nation.”
by John Markoff and Somini Sengupta, NY Times | Read more:
“We are close, in a sense, to people who don’t necessarily like us, sympathize with us or have anything in common with us,” Dr. Kleinberg said. “It’s the weak ties that make the world small.”
Still, he noted that such ties were hardly meaningless. “We should ask what things spread well on weak ties,” he said. “News spreads well on weak ties. Those people I met on vacation, if they send me some cool news, I might send that to my friends. If they send me something about a protest movement, I might not.”
Matthew O. Jackson, an economist at Stanford who studies social networks, raised questions about the bias built into a study based on random samples. He said the study confirmed Facebook’s success in being where millions of people communicate. “It’s more evidence that they’ve been enormously successful at connecting a large number of people very well,” he said.
The research underscores the growing power of the emerging science of social networks, in which scientists study the ways people interact by crunching gigantic sets of Internet data.
“These social network tools provide individuals with tremendous reach,” said Dr. Horvitz, the Microsoft researcher. “People can share ideas with only a few jumps to a large portion of the world’s population and with even fewer steps to the entire population of a nation.”
by John Markoff and Somini Sengupta, NY Times | Read more:
