The researchers said that when focusing on a single country, most pairs of people are separated by only three degrees, or four hops, and the vast majority of connections span only a short distance. "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," they said. "The average distance in 2008 was 5.28 hops, while now it is 4.74." "And as Facebook has grown over the years, representing an ever larger fraction of the global population, it has become steadily more connected," they said. "While 99.6 percent of all pairs of users are connected by paths with five degrees (six hops), 92 percent are connected by only four degrees (five hops). "Six degrees actually overstates the number of links between typical pairs of users. "We found that the degrees of separation between any two Facebook users is smaller than the commonly cited six degrees, and has been shrinking over the past three years as Facebook has grown," they said. In a blog post late Monday, Facebook's Data Team said the researchers had used state-of-the-art algorithms to approximate the number of "hops" between all pairs of individuals on Facebook. According to a study by Facebook and the University of Milan, the average number of steps it takes to link any two individuals on the social network is 4.74.
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