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"Facebook depends on its connectedness, and the fact that users are connected to each other and users are connected to brands, enables the diffusion of important messages, a big part of which is our advertising platform," Marlow said. The study is intended as academic social research and will be published in peer-reviewed scientific journal, said Watts, a widely recognized authority on social networks.īut the results could have applications to Facebook's business, Marlow said, because the degrees of separation between individuals, and between people and commercial brands that run ads on Facebook, are important. The current "Small World" experiment - anyone with a Facebook account can participate by going to - could help determine that. Therefore, it's important to test how effective people really are at transmitting a message from friend to friend, Watts said, to gauge how closely connected people really are. While the digital record of that graph shows the far-flung web of connections between people, individuals might not always be aware of how large their network really is, because they don't always know the friends of their friends. It also gets more dense, as the gaps between people are filled in by new members, said Cameron Marlow, Facebook's chief data scientist. On average, each of Facebook's members has 130 friends on the social network, and Facebook visualizes that web of connections as a person's "social graph." The social graph doesn't just grow wider as the social network - Facebook has tripled in size in the past two years - adds members. "It's a milestone, in terms of it's the kind of research question you can answer now that you could have imagined 50 years ago, but that you couldn't have answered 50 years ago - or even 15 years ago." "You really couldn't have done this until very recently," said Duncan Watts, Yahoo's principal research scientist who is leading the experiment. The latest version of the Small World experiment running on Facebook could help erase those questions. Milgram's conclusion was based on a small number of letters making it to their target, leaving room for doubt about his findings among many social scientists. The Yahoo-Facebook experiment could settle ongoing questions about whether the degrees of separation between people are as few as Milgram and other investigators concluded. Starting this week, social scientists from Facebook and Yahoo are hooking into that vast digital network to discover how many average online connections it takes for people to relay a message to a "target" - someone they don't know, in countries around the world. Something else has also changed - the advent of online social networks, particularly Facebook's 750 million members, and that's what researchers plan to use. The world's population has almost doubled since social psychologist Stanley Milgram's famous but flawed "Small World" experiment gave people a new way to visualize their interconnectedness with the rest of humanity.