Freaky stat of the week here at FOT, with implications for all that recruiting stuff you’re doing on LinkedIn and social networks. Microsoft dumped 30 Billion Instant Messages into a database, turned the scientists loose, and guess what? Kevin Bacon was freaking right…
From the BBC News:
"Microsoft researchers studied the addresses of 30bn instant messages sent during a
single month in 2006. Any two people on average are linked by seven or fewer acquaintances, they say.
The database used by Mr Horvitz and his colleague Jure Leskovec covered all of the Microsoft Messenger instant-messaging network, or roughly half of the world’s instant-messaging traffic, in June 2006. For the purposes of the study, two people were considered to be acquaintances if they had sent one another an instant message. Examining the minimum chain lengths it would take to connect all the users in the database, they found the average length was 6.6 steps and that 78% of the pairs could be connected in seven links or fewer.
One of the researchers on the Microsoft Messenger project, Eric Horvitz, said he had been shocked by the results. "What we’re seeing suggests there may be a social connectivity constant for humanity," he was quoted as saying by the Washington Post newspaper. "People have had this suspicion that we are really close. But we are showing on a very large scale that this idea goes beyond folklore."
So, it really is six degrees of separation – who knew? Only exception? If you have Shally Steckerl in your LinkedIn connections, I think you can take it down to four degrees.
Remember the lessons of the great one, Kevin Bacon. Your perfect hire is never more than six degrees from you at any point in time, and if the talent game doesn’t work out for you, you can always get a gig as a bike messenger.
What did you expect to wrap this post up – a clip from Footloose? Too easy…
