document: Planetary-scale views on a large instant-messaging network We present a study of anonymized data capturing a month of high-level communication activities within the whole of the Microsoft Messenger instant-messaging system . We examine characteristics and patterns that emerge from the collective dynamics of large numbers of people , rather than the actions and characteristics of individuals . The dataset contains summary properties of 30 billion conversations among 240 million people . From the data , we construct a communication graph with 180 million nodes and 1.3 billion undirected edges , creating the largest social network constructed and analyzed to date . We report on multiple aspects of the dataset and synthesized graph . We find that the graph is well-connected and robust to node removal . We investigate on a planetary-scale the oft-cited report that people are separated by `` six degrees of separation '' and find that the average path length among Messenger users is 6.6 . We find that people tend to communicate more with each other when they have similar age , language , and location , and that cross-gender conversations are both more frequent and of longer duration than conversations with the same gender .
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