![]() The game’s name is a reference to “six degrees of separation”, a concept which posits that any two people on Earth are six or fewer acquaintance links apart. ![]() The website credited as being the “first online social media” site is Six Degrees. The reason Six Degrees is considered to be the first of the social networks is because it allowed people to sign up with their email address, make individual profiles, and add friends to their personal network.The Economist recently published this insightful article entitled” Six Degrees of Mobilisation: To what extent can social networking make it easier to find people and solve real-world problems?” The notion, six degrees of separation, comes from Stanley Milgram’s experiment in the 1960s which found that there were, on average, six degrees of separation between any two people in the US. “Can this be used to solve real-world problems, by taking advantage of the talents and connections of one’s friends, and their friends? That is the aim of a new field known as social mobilisation, which treats the population as a distributed knowledge resource which can be tapped using modern technology.” The Economist thus asks the following, fascinating question: Last year, Facebook found that users on the social network were separated by an average of 4.7 hops. ![]() The article refers to DARPA’s Red Balloon Challenge, which I already blogged about here: “Time-Critical Crowdsourcing for Social Mobilization and Crowd-Solving.” The Economist also references DARPA’s TagChallenge. Can this approach also be used to verify social media content during a crisis? In both cases, the winning teams leveraged social media using crowdsourcing and clever incentive mechanisms. ![]()
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