Bangalore: Researchers at Facebook and the University of Milan stated that everyone is on average just about five steps away.  A friend of a friend introduction can be connected any two people on average of 4.74. The research was lined with the “six degree separation theory” published by the social psychologist Stanley Milgram in 1967.

The new research analysis by Facebook is the largest social network studies ever released. And this data sourced by examining over 721 million Facebook users for the study done earlier this year. The opted number has been representing more than 10 percent of the world populace.  The research had examined the 69 billion friendships among the 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,” the research team said.

In 2008, the average degree of separation between two random profiles was 5.28. As the Facebook users’ number has increased over years, the world getting connected more closely on the social networking site. And now the distance is just 4.74 connections. 

“While 99.6% of all pairs of users are connected by paths with five degrees (six hops), 92% are connected by only four degrees (five hops)”, the new report says.

 In the United States, where more than half of FB users located over 13 are on Facebook, it was just 4.37.

In view of a single nation, nearly everyone is separated by a three degree distance or four. 

“We found that 84% of all connections are between users in the same country,” the research team claimed.

The research has been done by computing a huge number of Facebook user’s samples and the University of Milan developed a new set of algorithms to calculate the average distance between two random people. 

The six degrees separation concept originated from the short story “Chains” by Frigyes Karinthy, a Hungarian writer and later adapted to the social psychology by Milgram.

"It is important to note that while Milgram was motivated by the same question (how many individuals separate any two people), these numbers are not directly comparable; his subjects only had limited knowledge of the social network, while we have a nearly complete representation of the entire thing," Facebook writes on its data blog. "Our measurements essentially describe the shortest possible routes that his subjects could have found."

The 2008 study was based on the network of people who exchanged messages but the buddies, Eric Horvitz, a Microsoft researcher who led the study said.  "There is an issue of how many friends you actually have," he said. Internet era might have distorted the definition of friends, he added.  

"We are close, in a sense, to people who don't necessarily like us, sympathize with us or have anything in common with us," Jon Kleinberg, from Cornell University told. "It's the weak ties that make the world small."