Sina Weibo has a fun new experimental feature called ' Six Degrees of Separation ' [1] which will show you your tenuous relationship with any other user of the popular microblog service. Named after the concept that everyone in the world is connected to someone else by a chain of no more than six acquaintances, it did indeed show me that, for example, I'm only three steps removed from the leggy Hong Kong pop star Karen Mok (pictured below) – well, in terms of who's following who on Weibo. Since the American actor Kevin Bacon is not on Weibo, the running internet joke and parlor game involving him cannot be replicated on the Chinese Twitter-esque site.
The little feature is hidden away in Weibo's data labs and can be found here. Aside from providing a little fun, it could be a useful way of finding connections between people who use Weibo – such as with a view to making a business connection. After all, this is China, and so guanxi – interpersonal relationships – can give a huge boost when trying to get ahead.
While you're rooting around in the Weibo data labs, check out some of the other neat social analytics it offers in the sidebar, such as showing you what kind of topics those you follow are into, and which nearby tweets are trending. I really wish Twitter – which in some ways looks sparse and featureless compared to the fast-growing Sina Weibo – would add such easy to access user analytics as well.
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The phrase arose from the play of that name, but was based on the notion derived from the small world experiments into the average path length between individuals on social networks in the U.S. ↩
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