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The theory of six degrees of separation is a fairly well known one. For those of you who are in the dark, this is a theory that states that [almost] everyone in the world is no more than six steps away from every other person in the world. It’s a pretty nifty theory I think.

The reason that I am talking about this theory is that many people know the theory in relation to Kevin Bacon (the actor). I have heard that every person in the world is within six steps or less of Kevin. Firstly I always wondered how is that actually possible, prove it. Then I would wonder why the theory uses Kevin Bacon and not, for example, James Dean?

Anyways, The Oracle of Bacon is one hell of a cool site that illustrates links from any Hollywood star, dead or alive, to Kevin. Go ahead, make my day, try and find an actor alive or dead without a link to Mr Bacon, I don’t think you can do it.

Then on to more pressing and interesting business:

Six degrees of seperation and social networks

For a while now I have been wondering about the myspace/facebook/social network craze that is about. I wonder why, I wonder how, I wonder how many and what is it that these people are after. I think that the six degrees of separation is a very good explanation of what keeps people coming back.

I have just over 160 friends on Facebook. If you don’t think I do, go check my facebook out. Now let’s put this theory to the test. There are approximately 7000 South Africans on Facebook. If I have 160 friends and counting and you multiply each person by 6, you get 960. That is an immediate network of 960 people that I know through my network of 160 (that’s one step). If each of those 960 people multiply by 6 and extend their network to 5760 then within 2 steps I know 5760 people. One final example: take those 5760 people and extend their network by 6 and you get 34 560 people. There aren’t even close to that many people in SA on Facebook.

(Disclaimer: My mathematical understanding of six degrees of separation might be completely out of whack, but for the purposes of this post you just need to understand the principal of what I am trying to get across)

I firmly believe that it is this theory that makes social network sites such as Facebook successful. If I had no desire to push my network to the extend of its network then I would have no drive to use these sites. Six degrees to keep social networking sites running.