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Ask My Network's success is based on the theory of six degrees, which suggests that everyone in the World is connected to everyone else through no more than six connections (or degrees). Your immediate friends, family, colleagues and so on would be your 1st degree. Their friends and family would be your 2nd degree contacts, and so on. Ask My Network uses this concept to govern its privacy policies and to maintain the value and integrity in the system. You control this through your privacy settings. In general, Ask My Network focuses on your 3 degrees (so the friends of your friends' friends)
In 1967, the social psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted a seminal experiment to
test the hypothesis that members of any large social network (in his case, the population
of the United States) would be connected to each other through short chains of
intermediate acquaintances.
In order to test this contention, Milgram introduced a novel technique of sending
passport-like packets to a few hundred randomly-selected individuals in Nebraska and
Kansas, with the aim of sending the packets to one of two "targets" in the Boston area.
The task Milgram set for his subjects had the additional constraint that each person
could send the packet (after recording certain demographic details about themselves)
only to someone whom they knew on a first-name basis, and who they thought was more
likely to know the target than they were themselves. To inform their decisions, Milgram
provided some information about the target, including their name, address, and occupation.
He then tracked each of the packets, by requesting that participants tear off a card and
mail it directly to him at Harvard.
His famous result, now enshrined in popular culture, and sociology dogma, was that the average lengths of the resulting acquaintance chains was roughly six, where the final member of the chain was the target itself. This result led to the phrase "six degrees of separation" later popularized by John Guare's 1990 play of the same name and numerous parlor games.
The world of showbiz is now recognised as a classic small world. That is, it is made up of lots of little cliques of actors, most of whom stay in their own patch of the industry, mixed in with a few highly versatile ones with random links right across the acting network who thus link every actor to every other via very few steps.
In fact, this had been known for years by movie buffs who play the so-called Kevin Bacon Game. The aim of the game is to link the eponymous American actor to any other via the fewest number of intermediaries.
Players were often struck by how often they could answer with the names of very few actors. For example, Bacon can be linked to Charlie Chaplin in just three steps: Bacon played in a film with Laurence Fishburne, who in turn was in a film with Marlon Brando, who himself once appeared with Chaplin.
Watts and Strogatz had confirmed what many players suspected was the explanation: the "short-circuiting" effect of a handful of actors whose careers span different eras, genres and cultures. For example, by starring in both Lethal Weapon and Hamlet , Mel Gibson short-circuits the all-action and classical genres, while martial arts actor Bruce Lee links the Chinese film industry to Hollywood.
The corporate world does show signs of being under the influence of small world effects, according to Bruce Kogut of the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, and Gordon Walker at the Cox School of Business at the Southern Methodist University in Texas.
Kogut and Walker applied Watts and Strogatz's methods to the ownership networks spanning over 500 of Germany's biggest corporations. Predictably, they found lots of cliques in the ownership of firms, the result of various tie-ups and mergers. But they also found that the short-circuiting effect of a few corporations typically allowed the ownership of any one firm to be linked to any other via just four intermediaries. In other words, for all their diversity, Germany's biggest firms actually form a cosy small world.
