Recent studies by Microsoft conducted over the internet give support to the theory of six degress of separation. For those who may be wondering what that theory is, Wikipedia states that: "Six degrees of separation refers to the idea that, if a person is one step away from each person he or she knows and two steps away from each person who is known by one of the people he or she knows, then everyone is an average of six "steps" away from each person on Earth."
Jure Leskovec and Eric Horvitz, at Microsoft Research in Redmond Washington, have crunched through masses of data, logging a month's worth of global 'instant messaging' conversations using Microsoft Messenger. 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. Eric Horvitz has mentioned on his official company report that, even on world wide web, the average path length among Messenger users is 6.6.
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