If 95 or 97 letters out of 100 never reached their target, would you say it was proof of six degrees of separation? So why do we want to believe this?
It is not a surprise that letter-passing experiments designed to test the six degrees of separation idea don't work. Since no one has a God's-eye view of the global social network, no one has any idea how to reach someone who is more than one degree away from them. That doesn't mean that the small-world network is a bad model; it may be a good model for the objective structure of the social network but not take into account an individual's limited knowledge of that network.
This, on the other hand, is definitely a good point:
What is more important is not the number of links, but the quality.
So we can enrich the theory by weighting the edges of the connectivity graph, which may very well reveal that social networks are more clique-ish and less well-connected than we thought.
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