From Degrees of Separation to Mirrors

How many people would it take to connect any two people on the planet? Via a friend of a friend…of a friend chain? In 1929, the answer was called out to be “six degrees of separation”. Recently they tested that via (what else?) Facebook! Laugh all you like, but Facebook’s sample size is 1.59 billion users which I am pretty sure is way bigger than whatever sample size they used in 1929. The answer? In 2011, Facebook analysis yielded an average of 3.74. Today, when even more people are on Facebook, the answer has shrunk to 3.57.

This isn’t the first time Facebook has been used to analyze social theories. The dataset that Facebook has is unparalleled for such analysis. On the other hand, that raises privacy concerns….

Talking of tech companies, they sure do weird things. Often out of paranoia. Like when Google got into mobile long before the iPhone based on their fear of Microsoft dominating mobile and locking Google out. Today, with the dominance of Android and iOS, that seems laughable but it was a valid fear back then. And now with the dominance of Android globally, Facebook has been fearful of Google locking Facebook’s app out. So much so that, sometime back, Facebook deliberately crashed its Android apps for weeks! Why? To see if users would still visit Facebook's mobile site or abandon the platform altogether. Thankfully, for Facebook that is, users kept coming back.

As Andy Grove once said, only the paranoid survive.

As we keep moving inexorably into a world of smart devices (phones, tablets, homes and watches), the next one in line seems to be the humble bathroom mirror. A Google engineer has created a prototype of such a mirror to show the time, weather and news snippets! He plans to add traffic and reminders next. I guess we are soon going to be able to ask our mirrors questions beyond the narcissistic “Who is the fairest of them all?”

Comments

  1. Ramiah KumarFebruary 8, 2016 at 9:23 AM

    Reading your last line's end “Who is the fairest of them all?” I realized that at least in the technology of using mirrors to give accurate information, the fairy tale has beaten IT to it! :-) Even in the movie 'Snow White and the Hunter' the evil queen is told in no uncertain terms by no less a contraption than the mirror on the wall that it was Snow White who was fairer and beautiful, which broadly the viewers knew to be true anyway, but the evil queen was unwilling to accept.

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