Facebook now let's you see your "degree of separation" from everyone else in the world - or at least those of them who're members of the social network. Facebook crunched the numbers to test the common belief that everyone on the planet is connected to everyone else by six other people and found the real number is 3.57 degrees or, in other words, three and a half people.
The Six Degrees of Separation theory was first put forward by Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy in a 1929 short story and it was further popularised in John Guare's 1990 play of that name.
Using statistical algorithms to analyse data on its 1.6 billion users, Facebook concluded that the majority of people on the social network are connected to everyone else on the network by an average of between 3 and 4 steps.
The company concludes that we're becoming more interconnected all the time - a 2011 study found that the then 721 million people using the site were connected by 3.74 degrees.
Facebook users can see their own degree of separation by visiting this post on the company's research blog: https://research.facebook.com/blog/three-and-a-half-degrees-of-separation.
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