6 degrees of seperation

Six degrees of separation refers to the idea that everyone is on average approximately six steps away, by way of introduction, from any other person on Earth, so that a chain of, "a friend of a friend" statements can be made, on average, to connect any two people in six steps or fewer. It was originally set out by Frigyes Karinthy and popularized by a play written by John Guare. - thank you wiki.

This hypothesis is still a hypothesis but one look into the social networking sites and you can accept it as a fact with some degree of certainty  The picture below will highlight this point.(I hardly know the 1st level connection.)

This should make the world a happier place. You can reconnect with lost people and renew lost acquaintances. But that is where the whole thing goes horribly wrong. The fact that people get lost is because they wanted to get lost or we wanted to loose them. Is there a third option?

So are we really reconnecting? And is a friend of a friend my friend just because the friend is friend of friend? (Ok that was intentional ; ) )

Facebook is getting tougher every day, how do you explain a "friend" request from your elderly relatives or worse kids you have seen grow up from their diaper days? And the people who interact online do not offline, often leaving me confused when I run into them in the real world.

The more we get connected the more we drift apart.

(LinkedIn has been a real boon helping convert cold calls to referred calls but that is an aberration.)