Facebook can now tell you how connected you are to the rest of humanity

Instead of six degrees of separation, Facebook is saying the number is closer to 3.5.

Jonathan Lim| February 05, 11:03 AM

For close to 100 years, the Six Degrees of Separation Theory had people thinking that any two individuals in the world are separated by five people.

Which is to say you know someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows Morgan Freeman — or there are five people separating you and Morgan Freeman.

But on Thursday, social network giant Facebook released some interesting findings on its research blog.

It announced that "Each person in the world (at least among the 1.59 billion people active on Facebook) is connected to every other person by an average of three and a half other people."

The blog also shared Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's "degrees of separation" - 3.17. Facebook's Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg has 2.92 degrees of separation, which means to say she has more connections to people with higher degrees of connection.

Screenshot from Facebook Research blog Screenshot from Facebook Research blog

The blog post goes into greater detail on the algorithm that estimates this new degree of separation.

You should hop over to it, and if you are already logged onto Facebook, you will be able to see how "separated" you are with the rest of the world. The lower your score is, the better-connected you are.

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