How connected is the world?

It’s a smaller world than we think when the conventional wisdom was that there were six degrees of separation between everyone on the planet but Facebook used its friend graph to calculate the degrees separating its 1.6 billion members and found it is as few as 3.57 people. That means every person in the world – you and me, are connected to every other person by an average of three and a half other people. Within the United States, the gap is even smaller, 3.46 degrees.

Our collective “degrees of separation” have shrunk over the past five years. In 2011, researchers at Cornell, the Università degli Studi di Milano, and Facebook computed the average across the 721 million people using the site then, and found that it was 3.74. Now, with twice as many people using the site, we've grown more interconnected, thus shortening the distance between any two people in the world.

As the Socialist Party always argued...we are all friends and comrades