Drift Bottle
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Drift Bottle

Experiment of Six Degree of Separation

Every person in the world is separated from everyone else by a chain of about six people. How close will you connect to a superstar, a scientist, a politicians, or an entrepreneur. Drift Bottle will help you to find out, and place the shortest connection path into your profile!

1. Background

The notion, Six Degree of Separation, was inspired by Dr. Stanley Milgram' s experiment. In 1967, Harvard social psychologist, Dr. Stanley Milgram performed an experiment to determine the extent of social networks in the United States. He randomly selected 96 people in the mid-West to send a letter to a stranger located in Boston, MA. The senders were asked to send the letter to an acquaintance who they thought was most likely to connect to the target person through the acquaintance' s social network, the acquaintance was asked to do the same, and so on, until the letter was finally delivered to the target recipient. It only took about five to seven intermediaries on average to get each letter delivered. Dr. Milgram published his findings in Psychology Today.

With such small number of participants, Milgram' s experiment was hardly conclusive. In 2001, sociologists Duncan Watts and his colleagues at Columbia University conducted a modern version of the experiment to validate the notion using Email. Over 60000 participants from 166 different countries participated the experiment, they tried to connect to one of 18 targets from 13 countries.The targets included a professor at Cornell University, a veterinarian in the Norwegian army and a police officer in Australia. Among the 24,613 e-mail chains that were started, only 384, or fewer than 2 percent, finally reached their targets. Surprisingly, the completed email chain comprised of four people on average, probably because the shorter the chain, the less likely to be broken due to people ignore the email message.

2. How to Play

Drift Bottle allows you to prove the notion of Six Degree of Separation, find out the connection path with a specified target, and place the shortest connection path with a specified target into your profile. There are three different roles,

1. Drift Bottle Owner: a person who releases a bottle to a specific target or a volunteer;
2. Actor/Actress: those people who receive drift bottles from their friends and then send the drift bottles to their friends who did not receive the drift bottles;
3. Volunteer: those people who are willing to be the target of a drift bottle. Once a person becomes a volunteer, he/she will be listed at the volunteer list, people can select a volunteer from the list as drift bottle' s target.

If you want to find out shortest path to connect to a specific target, you can release a drift bottle to that target, and then send the drift bottle to one or more of your friends who are most likely to connect to that target in shortest connections through their friends' network. For example, if you want to find out your connection path to Bill Gates, then you can send the drift bottle the friend who works at Microsoft. If you do not have friends working at Microsoft, then sending the drift bottle to friends working atIT industry is more likely to connect to Bill Gates in a shortest connection than sending to friends working at chemical industry.

Similarly, when you receives a drift bottle, you' d better to pass the drift bottle to one of more of your friends who are most likely to connect to the target in a shortest path connected to the target.

3. Target Confirmation

1. If the target is a volunteer, it will automatically be confirmed and the connection path will be placed into the drift bottle owner' s profile.
2. If you are the target, please confirm you are the target by clicking on the "I am the target" button.
3. If you are a friend of the target, you can confirm you are a friend of the target and pass the drift bottle to him/her.
4. If you are a friend of the target, but your friend is not a member of Bebo, you can confirm you are a friend of the target by selecting "I am a friend of the target but he/she is not a Bebo member".

4. SPAM control

To prevent people from receiving too many notifications or emails, we limit one notification message (email or notification) each person per day (or every two days depends on people' s feedback for the notification). When people send drift bottles to you, if you already received a notification message within a specified period (currently one day), you will not receive notification message (email or notification) again, but the drift bottles will still be sent to you, when you enter into Drift Bottle application, you will see all drift bottles newly received.

5. More Readings

There are lots of articles about Six Degree of Separation, you can search Google to find out related readings. Below are a few worth to read:

• six degrees of separation
• Six Degrees of Separation, Is it a small world after all?
• How does 'six degrees of separation' work? Explanation is personal networking, Cornell computer scientist says
• E-mail Study Corroborates Six Degrees of Separation
• With E-Mail, It's Not Easy to Navigate 6 Degrees of Separation

6. About

AntsBase is a leading provider of web applications, mobile applications and web widgets.It provides you PIM, personal finance management and electronic business card related services. AntsBase system allows you manage your personal and business info, publish and search important info in your daily life and business activities through Web browser, smart phone, PDAs and other mobile devices anywhere anytime. Data among server, mobile devices and third party applications such as Outlook will be kept identical through synchronization.

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