Have you ever heard of âSmall World Networkâ or something so? The birth of Orkut encouraged me to see if I can find any related result that show what would happen in this network. As you may have noticed, your connection path length is a small number (mine is 2.8 currently connecting about 320K people), though you feel familiar with your network (it is clustered). D. Watts and S. Strogatz in their âCollective dynamics of small-world networksâ (*) showed that this property is possible for small-world networks. This kind of network can be considered as a regular graph with some perturbation in its regularity. They hypothesized that social networks are of this kind and proved their claim by considering some different natural networks like actor networks, power-line networks (yes! It is not a social one!!) and neural network of a worm. I think Orkut is a fascinating resource for these kinds of research.
(*): D. J. Watts and S. H Strogatz, âCollective dynamics of small-world networks,â Nature, vol. 393, pp. 440-442, 1998.