Evita and Anete wrote a post about the conclusions of the YaBs’ project:

http://www.ep-webeditors.eu/2009/06/how-did-our-experiment-work/

All the best,
T.

do you have any news regarding this story?

The real-life problem with the six degrees of separation phenomenon (I think five is even more realistic in the European context) is that it’s quite hard to prove with a concrete flow of a single object.

First problem: Activation of the right relations.

In order to show the shortest distance between two individuals in a network, the object needed to be handed over only to persons that are actually closer to the destination than the person before. This means that the every person on the path would need to know who is closer to the destination (which is rarely the case). If not, the object might take much longer paths.

And the second problem is timing:

It is possible that there is a quite short distance between two person (i.e. only two intermediates between them), but in the real life not all relations are activated with equal probability. So it might be quicker for an object to be given seven times from hand to hand of people who meet very frequently (and to reach the destination on a longer path) than to wait until the relations along the shortest path are actually activated (this might be only once in half a year).

But I’d be more than interested to hear about outcome of this story!