Five Degrees of Separation from All of Facebook

And thus that Kevin Bacon game has been won by all.

Facebook might have more than 700 million active users, but a new analysis of the social network finds that 99.6 per cent of its users are connected to each other by just five degrees of separation. Further, 92 per cent of users are connected by just four degrees, or five "hops", among users' friends. This is despite 84 per cent of all friendships on the site being among people living in the same country. According to Facebook:

Thus, when considering even the most distant Facebook user in the Siberian tundra or the Peruvian rainforest, a friend of your friend probably knows a friend of their friend. When we limit our analysis to a single country, be it the US, Sweden, Italy, or any other, we find that the world gets even smaller, and most pairs of people are only separated by 3 degrees (4 hops).

The study also found that the median number of friends for a user was about 100, and that there were a total of 69 billion "friendships" on the network.