Saturday, December 18, 2010

Social Media Networks

Social media seems to have infiltrated every person's life and influenced their lifestyle. The question becomes, how big is your network? Networks connecting through networks can be exponential in nature. For example, say a person has about 200 friends on Facebook. If each of those 200 friends are connected to 200 different friends, that becomes 40,000 second degree connections. If each of those 40,000 people are connected to another unique set of 200 friends, the number goes up to 8,000,000 third degree connections. It means that an average person could have about 8 Million third degree connections, which translates to the entire population of New York City. If we take it to the fourth degree, it becomes 1.6 Billion, almost a quarter of the world's population. So, the six degrees of separation theory makes sense. We are all connected to each other through a matter of a few human connections. When we look at the complexity of networks, they will eventually evolve as a simplified model where everyone else has access to everyone else in the world within a few degrees.