Six degrees of separation defines that given any two persons in the world, they can be related through at most six “friends of”. This concept was founded in 1995 and it has became part of the most welcomed notion being used around the world. It is also known as the Small World Phenomenon.

The phrase six degrees of separation is permanently etched into our collective psyches. The idea that every person in the world is generally no more than six degrees or connections removed from each other is a powerful, sticky concept that resonates with many people. Web 2.0 technologies, a continuation of the advancement of communication capabilities, may be helping us cut that average in half, especially through social networking sites like Facebook and microblogging services like Twitter.

Six degrees of separation

This catch phrase was inspired by the results of the “small world” experiments conducted by social psychologist Stanley Milgram in the United States of America in 1967 in order to determine how long it would take to get a letter from one stranger to another. After the results of this test were analyzed, Milgram’s team determined that the average path length, or the number of connections required to get from one point to another, was approximately 5.5, which rounds up to six.

Watch the documentary unfolding the science behind the idea of six degrees of separation. Originally thought to be an urban myth, it now appears that anyone on the planet can be connected in just a few steps of association. Six degrees of separation is also at the heart of a major scientific breakthrough; that there might be a law which nature uses to organize itself and that now promises to solve some of its deepest mysteries.

Interesting Links :
Microsoft proves there are just six degrees of separation between us
Six Degrees of Separation, Twitter Style

Few days ago Girish was wondering which were the top Mauritian-owned websites and in fairness it’s a very good question. I reviewed the Alexa list again and the following are the Mauritian websites that appear in the top 100 websites that people visit most regularly.

It is always interesting to see how Internet usage in Mauritius changes over time. The latest update from Alexa.com suggests that while social interaction is still the number one utility used by Mauritian net surfers, search is the next most popular activity.

If you’re into stats then here are the numbers; only 13 of the 100 most popular websites are Mauritians according to Alexa.

They are:

(1) Orange.mu (overall 10th in Alexa’s top 100 that Mauritians visit)
(2) Lexpress.mu (13th)
(3) Gov.mu (25th)
(4) Defimedia.info (28th)
(5) Myjob.mu (33th)
(6) Vinivi.com (43th)
(7) Lematinal.com (44th)
(8) Mcb.mu (50th)
(9) Lemauricien.com (55th)
(10) Islandinfo.mu (64th)
(11) Expat-blog.com (68th)
(12) Mauritiusturfclub.com (82th)
(13) Mbcradio.tv (84th)

The definition of Mauritian I’ve used is a little loose. We’re including websites here where the company is headquartered in Mauritius or primarily serves people in Mauritius. Two websites that I decided to omit from the list is the .mu version of foreign-headquartered multinational; Google.mu (2nd) and Servihoo.com (20th) as it redirects to Orange.mu. I’m open to sticking them back in if there’s enough of a protest.

Conclusion

Alexa is user centric method of collecting data where the user is required to install software which records usage, while obviously marketers & webmasters have access to their own site centric data. Ideally what’s needed and what would show the most actionable is network centric direct from the ISP’s. Alexa is completely inaccurate and can be gamed.

The film exposes the annual slaughter of more than 20,000 dolphins and porpoises off the coast of Japan, and how their meat, containing high levels of toxic mercury is being sold as food across Japan, labeled as whale meat. The majority of the world is not aware this is happening.

The purpose of the documentary and action site, is to raise awareness about the issue worldwide as well as to highlight the dangers of eating the contaminated meat and to pressure those in power to put an end to the needless and barbaric slaughter.

The result is a provocative mix of investigative journalism, eco-adventure and arresting imagery that adds up to an urgent plea for hope.

Nearly a million people have signed the campaign, which has clearly rattled the fisherman, however they haven’t stopped killing dolphins. Please watch the documentary, join the campaign and spread the word!
It’s far from easy watching, however it’s really important that this issue is brought to the worlds attention.

The dolphin hunt is scheduled to start again in September, though to April, and will continue to happen, unless we put an end to it.

Facebook is experiencing explosive growth among Mauritians. Every single friend of mine of Mauritian origin, anywhere in the world, is a Facebook user.

Total Number of Mauritians : 203,700 (110,520 people male 89,480 people female)
Relationship 59,840 single 6,920 engaged 23,700 in a relationship 23,960 married
Languages 176,360 English 26,520 French
Workplaces 340 works @ Air Mauritius 40 works @ The Mauritius Commercial Bank Ltd

Of Facebook’s 500 million users, only 203,700 are in Mauritius. But consider the growth, and the context: There were only 57,330 users in 2009; this in a land where there’s little reliable Internet connection outside urban areas, and in which most computer users share a machine with several others. The number of Facebook users has more than doubled due largely to Facebook’s concentration on mobile phone applications.

But this story — and Facebook’s continued growth in Mauritius is not a prosaic one of devices, applications, and Internet penetration alone. It is about the Mauritian nature and temperament.

Facebook allows [Mauritians] to do two things they love:
Tell everyone what they are doing (fer palabes); and stick their noses into other people’s business (met néné dans zaffaire dimoune)

What accounts for its rapid success? We are not looking at how the social network works; we are trying to see why it strikes a chord with Mauritians, culturally.

Oh yes, it’s a youth thing. You won’t find too many of your parents’ generation posting pics here or changing a status message to talk about how the rose blooming in their garden has made them happy. Nope. They’ll still call you on the good old phone to tell you all that.

What perhaps triggers the younger Mauritians is the way in which it appeals to our strong sense of ‘staying connected’. We have been, since the days of yore, a gregarious community. Catching up with the neighbour for a cuppa, dropping in to say hi to a relative, and so on, come naturally to us. These are aspects we’ve never questioned, but always found comforting.

Over the years, we had other things fight for our time and mental space. Commuting hours between home and workplace, squeezing in an appointment at the dentist, planning the next holiday… and calling your friend was pushed to the next day.

Enter Facebook. And it appeals to this ‘keeping in touch’ streak in you. It’s easy, effortless. And it gives you a format to stay in touch. Newspapers in Mauritius are overwhelmingly heavily censored and mind-bogglingly dull. Facebook, whose censorship and limited free speech policies are the result of a profit-driven American internet startup rather than a repressive post-colonial dictatorship, is also turning into an unexpectedly fertile platform for free speech. Though these reasons are not specific to Mauritians, they certainly seem stronger here, thanks to our socio-cultural factors.

In a country where even chatting with a stranger on a bus happens spontaneously, it just takes a platform such as Facebook to tap into the need for staying connected online.

Here’s a brilliant talk from author Matt Ridley at TED Oxford about the power of collaboration and exchange to create ideas.

Matt suggests that recent human progress is down to the combination of multiple ideas or ideas having sex using the biological metaphor.

Matt highlights the significant shift from making things for ourselves like simple tools, to today’s computer mouse, where millions of people are all making things for us.

This happened when human beings started to exchange between groups which happened around 100,000 years ago- people were trading before they were farming.

He quotes from the economist Leonard Reed, that no one knows how to make complete things anymore, we’ve gone beyond the capacity of individuals and it’s now all about the collective brain.

Technological progress is coming from the exchange, meeting and mating of ideas which is such a powerful force that it will conquer many of the major challenges that lie ahead.

Mark Zuckerberg and a handful of senior Facebook Executives attended a special edition of the London Facebook Developer Garage.

Their arrival signifies the start of a European expansion in conjunction with the continued push for developers and sites to adopt the Open Graph Protocol. At the event a number of interesting statistics were announced by Zuckerberg and the other executives.

50% Facebook users log on every day
26 million active users in the UK
50% of ‘likes’ from social plugins are from Europe alone
47% European viewers of the ages 12-17 watch TV while using their laptops (Forrester research)

“People don’t talk to share – they share to have something to talk about” – Douglas Rushkoft

The major announcement was that Facebook has now reached 26 million unique users in the UK. Also announced was 50% of all “Likes” originate from within Europe, which is about 50 million out of the reported 100 million likes so far, an early indicatator of the popularity of the Social Plugin platform.

Mark Zuckerberg

“Every year that goes by we get more access to information – it’s a really exciting time to be developing”

Facebook has created a movement of designing for people – the whole platform is built around people.

“Facebook is the most engaging web platform ever built, because it’s about people“

Three new things Facebook have introduced recently:

1. OpenGraph
2. Social Plugins (Over 300,000 websites are now using social plugins.)
3. Instant personalisation


“I think we’ll look back in a few years when the web is much more personalised and wonder how it ever wasn’t personalised.”

The event marked a good turning point for all European based Facebook Developers and it will be good to see more of a Facebook presence outside of their Palo Alto offices in California.

WordPress is one of the most popular open-source content management systems in use on the internet. But despite WordPress’ popularity, one knock against it has been the fact that it’s always been more a  ‘blogging engine‘ than ‘true‘ CMS.

Yesterday, WordPress took a big step toward achieving ‘true‘ CMS status with the release of WordPress 3.0. That’s thanks to several of the new features it contains.

The two most important features in this respect are:

• Custom post types. In previous versions of WordPress, content was either a ‘post’ or a ‘page’. But in version 3.0, developers have the ability to easily create post types of their own (eg. events, podcasts, etc.). Each custom post type gets its own section in the WordPress administration area. This not only makes it easier to manage different types of content on the back-end, and easier to display it on the front-end, but with a little bit of extra work, developers can customize how content for custom post types is added in the administration area.
• Custom taxonomies. WordPress has supported custom taxonomies for some time now, but in WordPress 3.0, custom taxonomies are taken to the next level. Now, fully hierarchical custom taxonomies can be added, making it easier to organize and group content and to display it to users in meaningful ways.

With these new features, WordPress may now be a viable option for projects it wouldn’t have been in the past, as developers will not have to reinvent the wheel to access functionality that is largely expected in a traditional CMS. From a competitive standpoint, WordPress may now be able to hold its own versus Joomla (and to a lesser extent Drupal) with certain kinds of projects that it realistically wouldn’t have before.

Of course, the fact that WordPress has evolved in this fashion isn’t entirely surprising, as larger open source projects have proven to be quite responsive to the demands of the market. This can be seen with two of the most popular open-source RDBMSes, MySQL and PostgreSQL. MySQL, which began its life as a lightweight database solution, has over the years become a much more robust offering, adding features such as ACID compliance. And PostgreSQL, which began its life as a robust, ACID-compliant offering, has become far more nimble.

If past is prologue, and WordPress 3.0 is but the latest evidence, developers can expect better and better open source solutions going forward.

Twitter’s attempts at developing a viable business selling ads are in full swing. Twitter’s latest experiment in this area: paid trending topics.

As I write this, Twitter users will find ‘Toy Story 3‘ in the list of Twitter’s worldwide trending topics. But unlike the other trending topics, it has a prominent ‘Promoted‘ image next to it.

According to TechCrunch, Twitter has confirmed that Disney/Pixar are paying for the Toy Story 3 trending topic:

As we have always said, we plan to test different advertising and promotional models in these early stages of our monetization efforts for both user and brand value. As part of this effort, we are testing trends clearly marked as “promoted” for an undefined period of time.

Like normal (read: unpaid) trending topics, clicking on the link generates a search result for the term. At the top of the list: a promoted tweet that Disney/Pixar is ostensibly also paying for. Below it: several ‘Top Tweets‘, which appear to be tweets that have been retweeted 100+ times.

On the surface, it looks like Twitter has come up with a fairly clever solution. The Toy Story 3 promoted trending topic is likely to expose far more Twitter users to Disney/Pixar’s promoted tweet, which has a link to Disney’s disneyticketstogether.com, a Facebook-based ticket sales application.

Of course, Twitter’s solution has to be more than just clever; it needs to deliver ROI. And when it comes to ROI, it’s not entirely clear that promoted trending topics, used in concert with promoted tweets, will ever be as effective as, say, AdWords when it comes to delivering intent and action. Two clicks are required (first on the trending topic, and then on the link in the promoted tweet). And since disneyticketstogether.com is on Facebook, Facebook members who aren’t logged in will have to log in. Non-Facebook members are, of course, out of luck.

Notwithstanding the structure of this campaign specifically, promoted trending topics also pose some risk for advertisers, as they can’t entirely control the tweets that appear in the search results. Not only could these tweets be negative, it seems like this may open the door for subversive guerilla marketing campaigns in some markets. Hypothetically, for instance, what would stop Reebok from engaging in a campaign to hijacking the search results for a Nike promoted trending topic?

Since promoted trending topics are an experiment, Twitter obviously has time to figure these sorts of things out. But one thing is clear: Twitter is serious about monetizing, and just about every part of the Twitter service is fair game.

The next version of the BBC iPlayer has been launched in beta today, with changes to the user experience, more personalisation, and integration with social networks.

The iPlayer is as popular as ever, enjoying its best month to date in April 2010, with 123m requests for TV and radio programmes. I’ve been taking a look at some of the new features.

The homepage, shown above, now has what the press release calls ‘sliding draws’ which open to reveal more content in each of the categories; featured, most popular, friends, and ‘for you’.

Other changes include a complete separation of TV and radio content to make it clearer for users, while you can also flick easily between channels while watching live TV.

The best improvements for me are the personalisation features. I use iPlayer regularly and it should know what I like based on my viewing habits, so making use of this data to produce recommendations would have been a welcome step.

Instead of simply learning from previous viewing habits though, it seems that the new iPlayer relies on users adding programmes into their ‘favourites’ folder, and then lines these up in a playlist for you.

The introduction of social network integration is another welcome step; while viewing any programmes, you can click to recommend it on iPlayer, as well as sharing it on Twitter or Facebook via the recommend button.

The addition of user recommendations should also make content discovery much easier, as you can now read other users’ reviews of programmes, and see the most recommended in chart form.

Other developments to come include the addition of links to programmes from ITV Player, 4OD, Clic, Demand Five and SeeSaw, meaning that the iPlayer can direct users to these other websites, while also making the iPlayer a more attractive destination.

For nearly as long as the internet has been available to the general public, entrepreneurs and technologists have dreamed of the convergence of the television and the web. From WebTV to today’s internet-enabled gaming consoles, the small screen and the internet have been introduced to each other.

But the type of convergence that many have predicted and sought to create has remained elusive. The world’s biggest search engine, however, hopes to change that.

Yesterday, Google announced Google TV, and behind the unassuming name is one of the company’s most ambitious initiatives. Google TV product manager Salahuddin Choudhary explains:

Google TV is a new experience for television that combines the TV that you already know with the freedom and power of the Internet. With Google Chrome built in, you can access all of your favorite websites and easily move between television and the web. This opens up your TV from a few hundred channels to millions of channels of entertainment across TV and the web. Your television is also no longer confined to showing just video. With the entire Internet in your living room, your TV becomes more than a TV — it can be a photo slideshow viewer, a gaming console, a music player and much more.

Google TV uses search to give you an easy and fast way to navigate to television channels, websites, apps, shows and movies. For example, already know the channel or program you want to watch? Just type in the name and you’re there. Want to check out that funny YouTube video on your 48” flat screen? It’s just a quick search away. If you know what you want to watch, but you’re not sure where to find it, just type in what you’re looking for and Google TV will help you find it on the web or on one of your many TV channels. If you’d rather browse than search, you can use your standard program guide, your DVR or the Google TV home screen, which provides quick access to all of your favorite entertainment so you’re always within reach of the content you love most.

The announcement of Google TV was the centerpiece of the Google I/O conference, and for good reason. If Google succeeds in merging the best of the internet with the best of the small screen, it will become, as CNet News.com’s Tom Krazit puts it, “a new consumer electronics power broker.”

But can it succeed? Google appears to be off to a good start. It managed to bring seven CEOs from top technology, consumer electronics, media and retail companies on stage for its announcement. And it has already forged partnerships with Sony and Logitech to bundle Google TV with televisions that will be available at Best Buy stores as early as this fall. Google TV will also be included in blu-ray players and for consumers who don’t want a new television or blu-ray player, companion boxes will also be sold. Best Buy CEO Bryan Dunn, who participated in the Google TV launch, referred to Google’s newest initiative as “not just a new aisle but a new category.”

One of the reasons he might be so excited is that Google TV is a platform. Google TV is based on Android, and soon developers and media companies will have access to a Google TV SDK and APIs so that they can build web-based applications designed specifically for the television. Not surprisingly, those applications will be available for download and purchase via the Android Marketplace.

In essence, Google is attempting to do for television what Apple has done for mobile. And if it succeeds in building the App Store of the small screen, it will not only have built a new market Apple has tried and failed to develop, it will potentially be in a stronger position to dent Apple’s mobile dominance. After all, Android is holding its own in mobile. It will have a place in the nascent tablet market, and the soon-to-be-released Froyo update includes Flash support, something iPad owners say they want.

In many ways, Google seems to be making all the right moves with Android, and if Android also becomes a viable platform for reaching a large number of consumers via the television, it will be awfully difficult for developers and media companies to ignore Android. After all, more screens can mean more revenue. Driving home the potential here: Americans watch nearly 35 hours of television every week; they spend just under 4 browsing the internet. According to Nielsen, simultaneous television viewing and internet browsing is on the rise, hinting that consumers might be ready for the kind of new television-web entertainment experiences Google TV could bring to the masses.

Of course, Google needs more than just vision to succeed with Google TV; it needs execution. That said, Google TV might be one of the most important things the company has attempted, and that alone makes it worth getting at least a little bit excited about.