Just six steps away ----

Last few years have seen a rapid growth for the Social Networking sites. The saga that had started with Orkut , has been carried forward by Facebook and LinkedIn and numerous other sites whose account requests spams keep flooding your email account. Rarely is a day , when I dont see the Birthday calender , join my network sort of messages in my inbox and directly as well as deliberately , click on " Report as spam" button. But, unfortunately, messages from same e-mail address invade my inbox a few days later. I have always failed to understand what happiness people draw in sending their reminders and invitations and above all , why the hell they choose my e-mail id . Anyways , I am too much satisfied with my Orkut and to some extent Facebook as my social network accounts and LinkedIn as my professional network account.
Around 1-2 years earlier, I had heard a theory " Six degrees of seperation " when I was going through the concepts and history of networking sites. ( For the guys who ahve developed the habit of googling and wiki..ing ... I leave it for them to search it on ... for others who are lazy enough to avoid it or have got accustomed to spoon feeding , I make a small mention .. This theory says ... that any two person on this earth are separated by at max 5 persons . That is .. if you pick any random person , you are connected to that person through a chain of 5 common acquaintances. )

At that time , I was digging to find out the behind-screens concepts of Orkut. How Orkut chaining works . Can this theory be verified from there ? What I could find aboutOrkut way of listing the link between you and any random profile you visit was ..it takes a common friend of both of you and link you using your common friend . But , alas, that was the end of the stoy . Orkut supported only 1 degree of separation and any profile you visit , not having any common friend , you were linked directly. Shit !!!! My experiment failed. And , the thirst to check its correctness faded away ... thanks to other activities in which I gained interest.
After almost a year and half, I again stumbled to this "Six Degrees" but , this time on facebook . It was an application present on facebook where you type any arbit name --- profile would rather be technically appropriate -- it would genrate the degree of sepeartion for you and that person . It was quite exciting for me . I played with this application for a number of times , giving craziest names from little - known away places . The results were quite surprising . Degrees of separation results came from 1 to max of 9.
Then , I googled for the latest article on this and .... some awesome references were at my mouse-clicks. There were many articles published with their results and findings. A recent study conducted on Facebook quotes avearge separation of the users in the facebook to 5.73 which is strikingly similar to the theory published.
Although , many have disregarded this theory as just an urban myth , giving the references of the African and South American tribes who lives in isolation. But , even if we just talk of the conencted world, we covering 6 billion + of world population . It again reimposes the faith of brotherhood. Just, 6 relations away , we are going to feel the pinch of the pain we inflict on the others. The lessons of peace, tolerance and universal brotherhood are the one which is going to stay with us in the longest run .