Everyone on the planet can be connected through seven links in a chain of contacts. It is established by the study conducted by Microsoft’s instant messaging network.

The researchers have confirmed that all persons are just six degrees from actor Kevin Bacon. The deep study of instant messaging networks used Microsoft's Messenger IM service to come to the conclusion.

The findings has approved the well-known 'six-degrees of separation finding,’ concept. It was given by researchers Eric Horvitz of Microsoft and Jure Leskovec of Carnegie Mellon University at the WWW 2008 conference in Beijing. The researchers have studied almost 30 billion chat sessions with the involvement of about 180 million users over IM. The earlier studies have also confirmed the notion of six degrees of separation but the samples used in the present study were 2 million times larger than the previous studies.

The study has shown that, Bill Gates is only 6 or 7 degrees away from free software advocate and Microsoft critic Richard Stallman