Microsoft Messenger statistics

A study of Microsoft Messenger users lends more force to the 'six degrees of separation' concept, an idea that we are only six steps removed from almost anyone else on the planet. Eric Horvitz of Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington, looked at a month's worth of global 'instant messaging' conversations using Microsoft Messenger, and counted how many messages were sent and from where.

Working with Jure Leskovec, who was an intern at the time, Horvitz tallied up a whopping 255 billion messages sent in the course of 30 billion conversations among 240 million people during June 2006. The researchers neither had any identifiable data nor the access to message content. They could, however, could correlate messages with information about age and gender logged by users when they registered for the service.