another six (or seven) degrees

Jure Leskovec (CMU) and Eric Horvitz (Microsoft) have just published this paper analysing 30 billion IM conversations* on Microsoft Messager over one month.

• Staying power & age: Young folk have more conversations but older folk have longer conversations with more messages.
• US, Canada, Spain, Scandanavia & Australasia are heavy per capita users of Messenger.
• Paths within between people in the communications network have a median length of 7 nodes.

Interesting links to the work of Duncan Watts.

Thanks: Graham