Oct 14, 2010
It’s a Small World Wide Web
FeedMag.com is back from the dead and my 1998 piece on Facebook precursor SixDegrees is resurrected:
Sixdegrees, as the name implies, is a site built around the idea that everyone in the world can be connected to everyone else by no more than six intermediate friends, relatives and acquaintances. Though sites riffing off of the same concept have been on the Net for years, “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” and the variations thereof were never serious attempts to map the human interconnections of the world. Sixdegrees, on the other hand, set out to build a human genome project for the business card set.
I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at UC Berkeley. I received a PhD in African American Studies, an MA in Government and an MA in Statistics from Harvard University. Previously, I co-founded BlackPlanet.com and the Brooklyn Excelsior Charter School. I can be reached at owasow -at- gmail -dot- com.