Facebook marks 12 years since its birth in Harvard dormitory

“Drawing attention to the fact that the number of Facebook users has almost doubled since 2011, the Facebook data team said: “. we’ve grown more interconnected, thus shortening the distance between any two people in the world”.

The figure, however, only includes connections between Facebook’s 1.59 billion users – excluding the roughly 5.7 billion other people who are not on the network, the Times reports.

The maths has been done using the social media giant’s handy data set of 1.6 billion people.

Facebook said Thursday that its research showed that “each person in the world” is separated from every other individual by “an average of three and a half other people”.

It’s a smaller world after all: Facebook has challenged the conventional wisdom that there are six degrees of separation between everyone on the planet. During that time, it’s also made waves for everything from its ambitious efforts to bring billions of unconnected people onto the Internet to its testing of “massive-scale emotional contagion” – a 2012 experiment that manipulated users’ emotions without their knowledge.

Mark Zuckerberg says he’s targeting five million users by 2030 so the average may well shift again. This means you could be connected to even the most distant stranger, hunched over a computer in some far corner of the world, by fewer than four people.

In short, there were a lot of statistics involved in calculating degrees of separation.

“We figured that rather than having this birthday that focuses on us, we should make sure that the world focus on what’s important that’s actually happening”, says Zuckerberg about why he created a special “Friends Day”.

Two sticker packs called “Best Friends” and “Friendship” have also been released as free downloads from facebook.com/stickers, the Facebook Sticker Store, intended for use within Facebook Messenger.