The Six-Degrees Principle

Orkutting is fun..Its even funnier with this thing called 'mutual friends'..I know that it is not recent, but still there are a couple of interesting stuff thats associated with this..

There is something called as 'Six-degrees of separation' .. What it means is not that every two guys in world would be connected by 'six hops'.. It just says that the average number of 'hops' would be six.. There have been experiments to verify this concept in facebook, where the average hop-length turned out to be 5.73 ( Strong validation , I should say )

In the last couple of months, my orkut friends list increased from sub-300 levels to 470+ ( and still growing ) owing to IIMK admission..I've started looking into the mutual friends list whenever I get a new connection..And there have been instances when I got literally startled like
" Oh..How does he know HER ? ".. OR .. "Oh..man, she knows that bugger? How come? "...This sense of strangeness is quadrupled when u do random orkuting clicking on someone's profile ( I used to do this when I had ample free time in Oracle..but thats not the case anymore :( ) ..then clicking on their 'interesting' friends..and so on.. And u end up at a chick's profile ..but invariably, there would be some guy who'd be there in the mutual friends list...

Had orkut given a feature in which u can enter two orkut profile URLs and check if they are connected or not , it would have been even more interesting.. Eitherway, owing to these social networks, I've started to look for these 'degrees of separation' more often.. And as MBA students, we are told to do more and more networking..Though that doesnt mean just expanding the linkedin / facebook / orkut networks, this has become an integral part of it..

This is actually creepy at times..Like, after 10 years, when the social networks somehow use a common underlying platform & open communication APIs, practically every two individuals in any corner of the world could be connected in 'six hops' .. And if you want to know how social networking thing can affect your marriage chances, check this entertaining post by Vinay :-) .. There are people who do evaluation of potential partner by extensive 'orkut-research' and even for that matter 'scrapbook-research'. These people have been severely affected since orkut came up that security features and all..But I'm sure that people would find alternate, if not better ways :-)

PS:- I've quite a few tasks whose deadlines are tomorrow 23.59 PM and quite a few subjects to prepare for monday... But I knew I just had to post this regardless of whatever stuff thats pending... because without constant updates on this blog, I wouldn't just be myself... And I dont want that to happen.

Ajith