everyone is a few hops away from everyone else. this applies in both directions: when I meet random people they always have some weak connection to other people I know, but also when I think of a collection of people as a cluster, most specific pairs of people within that cluster barely know each other except through other people in the cluster.
It’s worth noting that, though it’s true that for a sufficiently large cluster most pairs of people are not strongly connected, they are significantly more likely to be connected than in a random graph. This is the high clustering coefficient property of small-world graphs like the social graph.
everyone is a few hops away from everyone else. this applies in both directions: when I meet random people they always have some weak connection to other people I know, but also when I think of a collection of people as a cluster, most specific pairs of people within that cluster barely know each other except through other people in the cluster.
It’s worth noting that, though it’s true that for a sufficiently large cluster most pairs of people are not strongly connected, they are significantly more likely to be connected than in a random graph. This is the high clustering coefficient property of small-world graphs like the social graph.