Six degrees

Check out Columbia's Small World Project's in the press page. There have been eleven news pieces covering their recent "four degrees" of email separation announcement in the last two days. (I suppose there are twelve if you count this one from Yahoo!, but it's not listed on their page.)

Duncan Watts who led the experiment (and wrote a great book by the way) admits the results are biased towards short chains because of the simple fact that the longer a chain goes the greater the chances people will give up without completing it. He speculates that an unbiased result would probably be somewhere between five and seven, "with an average of six."

It's amazing to think Milgram had it pretty much right all along.