You are one degree away from everyone you know, two degrees away from everyone they know, and so on. The trivia game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon is based on the concept of the small world phenomenon and is based on the assumption that any actor can be linked through his or her film roles to actor Kevin Bacon. The game requires a group of players to try to connect any film actor in history to Kevin Bacon as quickly as possible and in as few links as possible.

With records of 30 billion electronic conversations among 180 million people from around the world, researchers have concluded that any two people on average are distanced by just 6.6 degrees of separation, meaning that they could be linked by a string of seven or fewer acquaintances. The database covered all of the Microsoft Messenger instant-messaging network in June 2006, or roughly half the world's instant-messaging traffic at that time, researchers said. See report on MSNBC.

Why does it matter that people from around the world are closely tied together? Researchers said that the knowledge might have applications for political organizations, charity efforts, natural disaster relief and missing-person searches.

Social Networking tools like Facebook and  Enterprise Collaboration & Social Networking tools like Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007 enable people to connect with the right people and resources for effective collaboration.