BizSugar.com › Products and Services › Facebook and Yahoo Set Out To Prove 'Six Degrees' Experiment

Are you really six degrees of separation away from Kevin Bacon? Or from the Pope, the mayor of Birmingham, England or the Unabomber, for example?While the idea that almost everyone in the world is only six social contacts away from anybody else in the world has been a popular topic in sociology and pop culture for a long time, no one was ever really in a position to prove it on a wide scale.Enter Facebook, which has more than 750 million active users all over the planet. If anyone can help prove the “six degrees” theory, it's the social networking phenomenon that Mark Zuckerberg built...with a little help from Yahoo.This week, Yahoo Research launched an online study to test the pop-culture theory. Using Facebook and its army of users, Yahoo’s “Small World Experiment” is inviting people worldwide to attempt to send a message to a specified “target” by creating an online chain of connections, reports AdWeek.