Anyone is 4 person away from you

Following @Pierre_Paperon tweet a while ago, awesome article from Facebook themselves discussing the famous Milgram’s (social psychologist) experiment about the number of people you need to connect yourself to anyone in the world. The first theory of this social connections goes back to the 30s, where people said that you could reach anybody in the world by a maximum of 6 hops. Milgram’s decided in the 60s to put this theory to experimentation by asking people to actually live experiment the concept. He found out that people were connected by an average number of 6.2 hops. Interestingly Facebook did conduct a survey on its 720 million accounts and did an extensive study on the hop distribution between people:               The average number of hops between any 2 people on Facebook was 5.3 in 2008 and is now 4.7 But more interesting: – 99.6% of any 2 people are connected by a maximum of 6 hops – 92%  are connected by a maximum of 5 hops – 35% of us on Facebook are 4 hops away from anyone in the world ! – but 85% of someone’s connections are connections between users in the same country. Ok, why a repost after @Pierre_Paperon post on twitter and the link with us at BeesApps ? Because when I read this article I was struck by the consequences of what you just read for a company like BeesApps, which seek for international presence but is definitely local today. Look at our visitors distribution as of today:                 Does it look familiar with what you just read ? Indeed … : Interesting facts: – 80% of French, we’re french at Beesapps ! What a surprise. – 13% of US, not sure how we got there but US people, as per a previous post on app revenue distribution per country, represent a large part of the iPad app market. – Only 2% UK – no german at all, quite strange given the proximity between our 2 country. – A few Japanese and Korean. But for instance, Japanese people account for 10% of iOS paid apps revenue, we’re far from it. Enough for the facts, let’s try to draw some conclusions. According to Facebook, I’m probably (I assume I’m more connected than the average human being on earth) 4 hops away from anyone in the world. Yet still, my audience is completely local and coherent with Facebook’s social graph demography … The question for us is How do we change this ? Well, there’s only one possibility: since through you I’m 4 hops away from any people in any country, I have to rely on you to spread the word OUTSIDE of your country. That’s the only we can change this distribution pattern, validated by Facebook study on 720 million accounts. Let’s try to have a small test here. If you read this article and find it interesting in its findings about a startup doing business at international level, you decide to forward it to 3 friends of yours OUTSIDE your current country. I promise that I’ll post an update every month on the visitors distribution and pattern evolution. Can we together break the social network paradigm ? 🙂