While most business leaders seem to be preaching "the future is dead," Robert Hof's "The Quest for the Next Big Thing" article in Business Week paints a more optimistic picture:

By the time I sit down to write, it feels like the tech industry is finally starting to turn around -- and that maybe what I discovered has a chance to produce something big. Indeed, the journey itself made me realize things weren't as dead as they seemed.

And yet, as described in this article on validation of the "six degrees" phenomenon published in Nature: "(E)ven if global social networks can be searched quite easily, a searcher may not exploit this asset unless he realizes the strength of his connectedness and has sufficient motive to make the effort."

Kenneth Chang reports in his New York Times article:

24,613 e-mail chains that were started, a mere 384, or fewer than 2 percent, reached their targets. The successful chains arrived quickly, requiring only four steps to get there. The rest foundered when someone in the middle did not forward the e-mail (and, of those who did not forward a message) less than 1 percent replied that they could not think of anyone to send the e-mail message to, suggesting that most simply did not want to be bothered.

Dr. Duncan J. Watts, the senior author of Columbia's Small World Experiement paper, sums up the practical value: "You can ask a friend of a friend for a favor, but that's about it."