6 Degrees of Seperation Confirmed?

I came across this study where Microsoft Research used technology to look at Stanley Milgram's 6 degrees of separation experiment. It used "anonymized data capturing a month of high-level communication activities within the whole of the Microsoft Messenger instant-messaging system."

The major take away of the study is that the average degree of separation is 6.6. I've always liked the idea that I would know everybody in the world through the connections of just 6 people. That means that I know you(1), you know him (2), he knows her (3), who knows her (4), who knows him (5), who knows Armando Guebuza, president of Mozambique.

I know this doesn't mean everybody in the world because it is only a sample of MSN users (240M people), but it's still pretty cool.

The results of the study also confirm what many of us already could guess about habits of IM-ers, including:

• people tend to communicate more with each other when they have similar age, language, and location,
• cross-gender conversations are both more frequent and of longer duration than conversations with the same gender.