HENRY

Now, I’m really skeptical of the six-degrees of freedom stuff, and mildly skeptical of small world network things in general (lots of shiny, little usefulness). However, I may be swayed by some new research coming out of Microsoft (?!) who tracked a metric crap-tonne of instant messages traveling through the MSN network:

Eric Horvitz, at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington, and Jure Leskovec, who was an intern at the time, crunched through masses of data, logging a month’s worth of global ‘instant messaging’ conversations using Microsoft Messenger — software that facilitates chat, in a similar way to e-mail, but in a more instantaneous and less formal fashion. The researchers then counted how many messages were sent and from where: in total they tallied up a whopping 255 billion messages sent in the course of 30 billion conversations among 240 million people during June 2006.

They found that the average path length is just over the Kevin Bacon gold-standard, at 6.6 nodes between any person. The full paper is available here.

Posted on March 16th, 2008 by Simon Greenhill