Viruses and Fads

I was really interested in the article "Viruses and Fads"! It made me wonder how many people we all affect in our daily lives. Surely, Gaetan Dugas was aware of that fact that he had sex with thousands and thousands of people, and at some point he was aware that he was HIV positive. And the people behind the "love bug" computer virus wouldn't have created it without the intent to infect others. But as I read it and thought about the huge chain of events the spread around the world, really, like Collins's political cartoon, and I remembered the six degrees of separation idea, I started to think of all the people each of us directly or indirectly affects in a day. (I know the whole idea's been done before---think: "Pay It Forward".) All of this got me thinking about facebook, and the number of "friends" (consisting of true friends, acquaintances, people you talk to in class sometimes, and maybe even random people) everyone has on there. I may be the only one who remembers, but when facebook first came out, it had a "visualize my friends" feature that was listed under your picture in your profile (where "view more photos of me" and "read notes by me" is currently). If you clicked it, this feature would set up a web with nodes named for each "friend". There was also existed somewhere a feature called "my friends friends" or something of the like, that when clicked displayed the names and photos of all of your "friends" along with all of their "friends". Sometime between the creation of facebook and now both these features have been erased. I think that with many people now having hundreds of "friends" it became impossible to show them all in a two dimensional web or to list them all along with all the thousands of their "friends". I think it would be very interesting to use facebook as a kind of social experiment. It links people all over the country, including those who may no longer be in the US, and I think it would be interesting to look at all those from whom you have six degrees of separation.