There was a time when people didn’t know how they were connected to others. So, scientists invented the “Six degrees of separation theory“. According to this theory, it is necessary, at most, 6 steps to connect any two people. To prove this theory, scientists have applied a very old method of communication: the letter.
First of all, scientists choose a target-addressee and send letters to several individuals with the addressee’s name written on them. The indviduals who have received the letter must resend it to the target-addressee. If they don’t know him or her, they need to send it to anyone from their contact list who might know the target-addressee.
With this experiment, people were keeping track of their contacts, showing scientists how they could be connected to the target-addressee. Nowadays, this theory could be easilly demonstrated by the social network systems that, today, are hugely popular. A good example of this in Brazil is Orkut, a social network created by Google. In the beginning, only those invited could sign up. So their friends invited their friends, who invited more friends and so on. After a short time, the Orkut creator from California was connected to millions of people around the world. Pretty incredible, isn’t it?
Another very interesting example is the famous “Oracle of Bacon”, a game based on this theory. With its vast data base, it is possible to discover how two actors are related and to find out their work history.
Now, if this is beautiful in theory, imagine graphically?
Generated graphs from social networks show how we are connected to each other. Therefore, some systems were coded to capture data from these networks and display in a graphical way.
The “Lost” and the “TV Globo” website produced graphs to show how the characters from plots are interconnected.
Below, there is a graph built by Neuro Productions that connects members of twitter.
Visually, the most interesting graph that I have found is Nexus, which collects data from Facebook. It is almost a starry sky! It’s like the system creates a galaxy, where each star represents a friend, and each group of stars, or friends, represents a constellation. In the end, we have a lot of friends’ groups together in our social galaxy.
Check it out, and tell me if it doesn’t seem like a starry sky…
I spent some time looking at my personal graph and how people were connected. After a few hours, I started to find the social network even more incredible!
Imagine a data base of all the different relationships that we have today. Years before, people wouldn´t have had the slightest notion of how friends were connected.
Look at graph analysis:
It is fact that facebook has limitations, because there are still many people that don’t have a facebook account.
Anyway, these findings justify the saying, even living in a world with 7 billion people: We live inside an egg!!