An interesting post on Technology Review looks into a recent study, that just concluded, by four researchers from the Department of Computer Science at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology.

Among their findings:

On the MSN messenger network of 180 million users, for example, the median degree of separation is 6. On Twitter, Kwak et al. hypothesized that because only 22.1% of links are reciprocal (that is, I follow you, and you follow me as well) the number of degrees separating users would be longer. In fact, the average path length on Twitter is 4.12.

What’s more, because 94% of the users on Twitter are fewer than five degrees of separation from one another, it’s likely that the distance between any random Joe or Jane and say, Bill Gates, is even shorter on Twitter than in real life.

They also posted this image as a representation of how re-tweets spread:

 

 

Read the full article by clicking here.

How effective do you find re-tweeting to be? Do you find yourself using it more than regular tweets? How can re-tweeting be applied to businesses?