Why Networking?

You must have noticed that Networking has become a new trend in this world wild web (that’s what I call it). It all started in 1995 with Classmates.com and then came Friendster, MySpace, Yahoo! 360° and many more. But the success of Orkut, Linkedin, FaceBook, MySpace etc has shaken the entire internet industry including India. And Bigadda, Connexions, Brijj, Techtribe, is just a beginning.

But have you ever wondered, what is the reason the behind overnight growth of these websites and what is adding fuel to all referral models?

I would say “Reducing Degrees of Separation”

Its wasn’t too long ago when we said that if on an average everyone know 42 people around them, then the entire 6 billion population of this world is just 6 degrees away (6th root of 6,000,000,000 = 42.628)

Use this formula:
(average number of friends per person) ^ (degrees of separation) = total population

With faster & cheaper means of communication this number (42) seems to be too small, especially for the online world. Forget about friends and family, even if you look at your phone book, outlook address book, Orkut friends this number will easily reach to 500.

If there are 32 million internet users in India and very pessimistically, even if we know 75 people around us, the maximum degree of separation for internet users will be just 4 for India and 5 for the entire world.

It isn’t too far when you'll see a sign on all the profiles on Linkedin.

BlogDay2007