Musings on Entrepreneurship and Innovation
Tuesday, August 12, 2003Six Degrees Revisited
Years ago, an experiment by Stanley Milgram introduced us to the notion of six degrees of separation, the idea that everybody is a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend of anyone anywhere. Curiously enough, almost nobody has tried to replicate Milgram's oft-referenced experiment. In a global study that included 60,000 participants via email, Duncan Watts and his colleagues have taken their shot. Watts notes in a recent New York Times article on the study (which I've taken the liberty of annotating in PDF), "Just because President Bush is six degrees from me doesn't mean I'm going to be invited for dinner at the White House. You can ask a friend of a friend for a favor, but that's about it." In other words, "it is not just a question about who knows whom, but who is willing to help."
Back in 1997, researchers at AT&T labs came to an identical solution after simulating searches for expertise across social networks. They observed that knowing the target is useful, but ultimately not as important as reducing the cost of search (in terms of effort) and increasing the response rate to inquiries. New services such as LinkedIn (and our own tool, the Water Cooler) are attempts to make the logistics of purposeful social network searches easier and more effective.
Watts and his colleagues are digging deeper into how people decide whom to message (and, presumably, whom to respond). A theoretical small world is entertaining, but an effective small world can be really useful.
