
(CNN) -- In the Facebook age -- when digital "friends" are just a click away -- the distance between people seems to be shrinking, according to data the social network released on Monday night.
The adage maintains there are "six degrees of separation" between any two people on Earth, meaning that any two people would know each other through no more than six intermediary contacts.
On Facebook, however, the average user is only 4.74 degrees away from any other Facebooker.
"Thus, when considering even the most distant Facebook user in the Siberian tundra or the Peruvian rainforest, a friend of your friend probably knows a friend of their friend," Facebook wrote in a blog post about its findings.
That conclusion comes from a non-peer-reviewed study of 721 million active Facebook users, released by Facebook in collaboration with the Università degli Studi di Milano, the blog post says.
Facebook calls the analysis "the largest social network studies ever released."
The Palo Alto, California, company says 99.6% of all Facebook users studied were separated by five degrees or less from any other Facebook user; 92% were separated by only four degrees.
Furthermore, that distance appears to be shrinking quickly.
"The average distance in 2008 was 5.28 hops, while now it is 4.74," Facebook says.
While online Facebook friends are more likely to be linked to far-flung friends-of-friends, their immediate circles of contacts are remarkably homogenous in terms of age and geography.
"We observed that while the entire world is only a few degrees away, a user's friends are most likely to be of a similar age and come from the same country," the company writes.
Within the United States, for instance, users on average are linked by three intermediary contacts.
Facebook compares its work to that of 1960s social psychologist Stanley Milgram's experiments to prove that people are separated by only six contacts.
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