Condemned to obscurity.
Somewhat to my surprise, searches for various snippets of the text of the Nature
abstract brought up no more than a couple of handfuls of pages that linked to
this study. It may be that the six degrees fad ran its course long ago, or it
may be that today one billion Messenger conversations a day doesn't have the same power
to impress that Google's eight billion pages indexed of almost three years ago did. On the other hand,
it may be that relatively few people encountered the study, or the links to it,
such that it simply didn't have a chance to go viral. It seems that in one or
another of its appearances, the study shows up about seventy times in del.icio.us,
but that's not enough to push it up to the popular list there, and Digg seems
not to have any references to it at all. That being the case, I was rather lucky
to find it - further proof that those "superfluous" links were actually
highly desirable.
Go to: Adding yet more bits, or
Go to: That's a lot of talk, or
Go to: Look Ma, I'm on (surveillance) camera!,
or
Go to: Holding on / Letting go.