flâneur

what a small world

walzr.com · 509 words · saved by 3 readers

I love asking someone I just met, whose hometown or university or company is the same as a friend, “Do you know ____?” The name game. I am constantly reminded how small the world is. It’s so cool that a friend can be one or two degrees away from another friend, from a completely different part of my life. I assume that this phonemonan is very common, but I only realize it rarely after pulling a loose thread in a conversation. I scraped my Instagram social graph, to find as many of these connections as possible. (I think I keep Instagram more intimate than the average person. My gauge for if I follow someone is “If I saw them at the grocery store, would I stop and talk to them for awhile?”) I got a list of my following and followers pretty easily, using this script, and threw out brand accounts. That left 233 people. I labeled where I met each person. Then, I scraped each one of their following lists, for a grand total of 217,723 relationships. I dumped all of this into a SQL database.

I love asking someone I just met, whose hometown or university or company is the same as a friend, “Do you know ____?” The name game. I am constantly reminded how small the world is. It’s so cool that a friend can be one or two degrees away from another friend, from a completely different part of my life. I assume that this phonemonan is very common, but I only realize it rarely after pulling a loose thread in a conversation. I scraped my Instagram social graph, to find as many of these connections as possible. (I think I keep Instagram more intimate than the average person. My gauge for…

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