explanation is [http://www.livejournal.com/talkread.bml?journal=sachmet&itemid=11756]
cut and pasted from there: From all of these projects, I came up with an idea. Myself and my friend aerolith were talking, and we were discussing the feasibility of a project where one could input any two users and find out if there was a way to create a chain between them. I wrote the tool in Perl and unleashed it upon the world in the form of LiveJournal Connect.
What is a chain? A chain is comprised of links of friends. A link is made anytime someone on LiveJournal adds someone else to their Friends list. Therefore, a chain is any list of links which can used to connect one person to another through their friends. In theory, a message can be passed along this chain to get from the first user to the last.
Let's say I wanted to connect to user randomuser. That is, I wanted to see if there were any groups of friends that I knew, that knew someone else, that knew someone else, and so on, until we got to someone that knew her. And as it turns out, one possible way for that chain to happen is: sachmet -> sweetcarol -> shann -> fourandtwenty -> voodoodollyiii -> randomuser (run this query) That is to say, I have sweetcarol listed as a friend, who has shann listed as a friend, and so on, until we get to randomuser.
What does this accomplish? Nothing in particular. But it's an interesting toy when you start considering it in aggregate. Consider these statistics: Hops 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Count 539 471 726 1509 1344 570 184 44 21 8
(These are all the successful searches, not all searches, and these are only the last 24 hours)
Notice something about the results? Most people take 4-6 connections to get to the target user. If I were to get the entire username database and do the stats on that, you'd notice that trend would continue. Generally, to get to a user more than 6 connections away, that user has very few friends, who in turn have very few friends, and so on.
Note also that this is just looking at LiveJournal friends. If I could somehow extract a list of everyone's friends, both in real life and online, and put it together, you'd be amazed at who you'd know through your friends! One of my old friends from high school is a pro wrestler. Another is a defensive player on the New England Patriots. The list goes on, but the point is that you know more people than you think you know.
So the idea is that if you meet someone new, and want to know if anyone else you know knows them, you can use this tool. If you find a random person that has the same interests as you, you can put your name and theirs into the tool, and theoretically, since everyone in the chain is a friend of you and that person, they'll have similar interests, too.
It's a toy. It has no practical value. It does very little. But what it does is makes us feel a little more connected with people. And it shows just how small of a world it can be.
no subject
explanation is [http://www.livejournal.com/talkread.bml?journal=sachmet&itemid=11756]
cut and pasted from there:
From all of these projects, I came up with an idea. Myself and my friend aerolith were talking, and we were discussing the feasibility of a project where one could input any two users and find out if there was a way to create a chain between them. I wrote the tool in Perl and unleashed it upon the world in the form of LiveJournal Connect.
What is a chain? A chain is comprised of links of friends. A link is made anytime someone on LiveJournal adds someone else to their Friends list. Therefore, a chain is any list of links which can used to connect one person to another through their friends. In theory, a message can be passed along this chain to get from the first user to the last.
Let's say I wanted to connect to user randomuser. That is, I wanted to see if there were any groups of friends that I knew, that knew someone else, that knew someone else, and so on, until we got to someone that knew her. And as it turns out, one possible way for that chain to happen is:
sachmet -> sweetcarol -> shann -> fourandtwenty -> voodoodollyiii -> randomuser (run this query)
That is to say, I have sweetcarol listed as a friend, who has shann listed as a friend, and so on, until we get to randomuser.
What does this accomplish? Nothing in particular. But it's an interesting toy when you start considering it in aggregate. Consider these statistics:
Hops 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Count 539 471 726 1509 1344 570 184 44 21 8
(These are all the successful searches, not all searches, and these are only the last 24 hours)
Notice something about the results? Most people take 4-6 connections to get to the target user. If I were to get the entire username database and do the stats on that, you'd notice that trend would continue. Generally, to get to a user more than 6 connections away, that user has very few friends, who in turn have very few friends, and so on.
Note also that this is just looking at LiveJournal friends. If I could somehow extract a list of everyone's friends, both in real life and online, and put it together, you'd be amazed at who you'd know through your friends! One of my old friends from high school is a pro wrestler. Another is a defensive player on the New England Patriots. The list goes on, but the point is that you know more people than you think you know.
So the idea is that if you meet someone new, and want to know if anyone else you know knows them, you can use this tool. If you find a random person that has the same interests as you, you can put your name and theirs into the tool, and theoretically, since everyone in the chain is a friend of you and that person, they'll have similar interests, too.
It's a toy. It has no practical value. It does very little. But what it does is makes us feel a little more connected with people. And it shows just how small of a world it can be.