Like crack for geeks

[da]

It's six degrees of Livejournal! Forgive me if you saw this back in 2003, but I didn't know it existed, and it's providing me no end of amusement.

LiveJournal Connect! Enter your username in the left box, someone else's username (or a * for a random one) in the right box, and press the button! -> Quiet Mutual 2 chains No 1-hop Users to ignore: Coded by sachmet

Try this: fill in two people from your friends' list who don't know each other. Put your name in "Users to ignore". Make it go.

If you come up with one with four hops or less, try and come up with a plausible explanation for how each person knows the next (viewing each person's profile page).

I chose: my brother, and a colleague of dan's who's currently in Germany.


To my surprise, there are only two people between cyanpill and tbiedl.

cyanpill -> lotusbiosm -> bopeepsheep -> tbiedl.

So... cyanpill knows lotusbiosm through their alma mater, Alfred U, and Unitarianism. I'm guessing that lotusbiosm knows bopeepsheep through some sort of baby link, though that's just guess. Finally, I'm pretty sure that bopeepsheep knows tbiedl through a usenet newsgroup.

In physical space, we've got: upstate NY, to Washington DC, to England, to Germany. Yay!



For the icing on the cake, I hope to meet the author of this tool, sachmet, at the upcoming Perl conference this June in Toronto.

Comments

[cyanpill.livejournal.com]

Hrm, much as I like being a test subject, I shouldn't even have Lotusbiosm listed, as she has not friended me back, despite the fact we have know of each other for years. So going in the other direction, I got:
tbiedl -> bopeepsheep -> anejo -> cicerothewriter -> caribbeanblue -> cyanpill

Which makes sense as Ms. Caribbeanblue has used LJ for years and has the buddies to prove it. Including someone in your town even, which surprised me. Would take a while for me to remember who it was however :P

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

That is surprising, though I suppose less so since she has a bazillion friends.

Through a little bit of detective work using the advanced search tool, I believe I found her. she's the only person who considers "caribbeanblue" a friend (or vice-versa), and lives in an unspecified location in Canada.

Happy? :)

[tbiedl.livejournal.com]

Fun! (And very addictive...)

For the record, the shortest connection between you and the AN community
(of which bopeepsheep is a member, and so am I) is only one other person. Weird!

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

Innit, though? :)

(fun; and a bit weird)...

On the weekend I was playing with the FOAF output (which is XML) autogenerated by LJ; unfortunately, it doesn't work as well as scraping the screen-output from the friends' list. Ah well. Back to work for me. :)