Facebook and BigData

A nifty study by Facebook on how connected we actually are.  In a nutshell

1. 69 billion friendships.  (Don't get into the Is This Really A Social Graph argument.  Please)
2. The six degrees of Kevin Bacon, are now effectively Five degrees of Kevin Bacon.  They're also getting shorter, and could maybe end up as Four degrees of Kevin Bacon
3. Most of the connections are weak ties, i.e. ones where we are barely/casually/dis-interestedly connected.  We might care about them under certain circumstances, but mostly we don't.

The tricky part here is the weak ties bit.  Its clear that network effects are in play with weak ties, i.e., the more people that are connected weakly, the more likely that some (significant) subset of these people will care about the same thing, hence pushing their strong ties into caring about it too, hence magnifying the cause (egypt!  w00t!).

Fun stuff!