Interesting study by O2: http://www.o2.com/media/press_releases/latest_pr_14276.asp
The study argues that the former thesis by US psychologist Stanley Milgram following a 1967 experiment has to be updated. Milgram found that, on average, people needed 5 connections to connect to any other person on the planet. These six degrees of separation have now found to be only 3.
Apparently technology, esp. e-mail, SNS and mobile phones, have made us more connected than ever and I think that's not only a fair observation but also a good thing. Some people complain about the fact that having a few 100 connections on FB or LinkedIn may be inflationary and hence useless, but they ignore the fact that those people are not only connections but also connectors, hence bringing a whole new form of communication between people to the table - trusted communication based on connection: If I try to contact, say, the head of marketing at Tata Steel (just one example), I would, today, be able to very effectively to get trusted access to that person, by using several social networks (incl. the online databases of my Alma Mater, of course). If I need advice from a local in Sydney, I can easily do that as well.
I emphasize trusted, because a major problem of our times is us drowning in (often unreliable) information. Most people resort to asking their friends for help to make often significant choices (find a dentist - ask a friend. select a cellphone model - ask your friends). If we are able to build a larger, more diverse, and hence more effective network of trusted connections, we should be able to better handle information and make better decisions.
I have been starting to take intense interest recently in technology to share private data between trusted social connections (rather than public data of the kind that Google thankfully aggregates for us). I believe that 3 degrees of separation will provide for a better search-ranking and hence recommendation algorithm than PageView, due to it not being prone to massive manipulation by web mareketers, but by leveraging the fact that we bond socially on being "alike" and hence share preferences and taste as well as a reputation and trust for one another.
These changes, well underway, will have massive impacts on information retrieval and decision making. Marketers - awake, if you haven't done so already!