The travel site is launching a new Friend of a Friend feature today, allowing users to see if a hotel has been reviewed by Facebook friends and their friends’ friends. It’s sort of like playing the Kevin Bacon game, but instead of six degrees of separation, TripAdvisor is only using one.

TripAdvisor’s VP of Global Product, Adam Medros, said that by adding connections, visitors are 10 times more likely to see reviews written by people in their network — even in obscure locations, ranging from Istanbul to Duluth, Minn.

“It’s always been a little hit or miss,” Medros said, about the likelihood of a friend having reviewed a hotel in the city you were searching. “Now, we’ve stretched the coverage by going out by one degree.”

The new feature is the latest move by TripAdvisor to make the 60 million reviews on its site more social. The company first got involved in Facebook five years ago, when it launched an app called Cities I’ve Visited, which lets you mark on a map where you’ve traveled.

With the help of that application and other efforts, TripAdvisor is the 18th most popular application on the social network, with 18.5 million monthly visitors, according to AppData.

The announcement today continues to leverage a partnership with Facebook, which gives TripAdvisor permission to personalize their Web experience using data from the social network. Only seven other companies have similar permissions.

To use the new Friend of a Friend feature, visitors to the site must log in using their Facebook account. Once they’ve done that and have conducted a hotel search, a little bubble will highlight that a review was written by a friend or someone a friend knows. In a search under Istanbul, I had no immediate friends who had reviewed hotels, but thanks to my friends’ friends, I had 10 reviews within my expanded network to check out.

It’s worth noting that TripAdvisor does not disclose any personal information about the friend, like their name or picture.

“We’ve always had this interesting challenge, where we have so much content for properties around the world — at some point, that’s helpful, but I’d love to see reviews from people like me,” Medros said.

Of course, there’s no telling if your friend’s friend is like you. “It still requires some weeding out,” Medros acknowledged.

He also said that the company has discussed the value in extending it even further. “It’s a running joke that if you take it out to three degrees, that everyone is a friend of everyone. I think we’ll stick with one degree for now.”

Just as there is a tendency to inanely cheerlead the tech sector valuations on the way up, there is inevitably the equally ridiculous overreaction to the downward slide going on right now for digital companies.

Thus, while by no means the weakest sector of the economy, a range of tech stocks got hammered today in the markets, getting dragged down with the market at large as investors continued to fret about a sustained worldwide recession that government bailouts could not prevent.

Consider, after a week of getting socked, even more blows:

Yahoo (YHOO) closed at $15.19, down about 5 percent or 81 cents.

Google (GOOG) closed at $369.37, down just under 5 percent or $17.54.

Microsoft (MSFT) closed at $24.91, down 5.4 percent or $1.41.

eBay (EBAY) closed at $17.89, down 5.5 percent or $1.05.

Interestingly, the company with the most consumer exposure, Apple (AAPL), fell below $90, before closing at $98.14, up 1.1 percent or $1.07.

Now, there’s no question some of this tech carnage was due to the sector riding higher than most and worries about future results. Analysts are cutting estimates across the industry, in anticipation of weaker advertising and international markets.

At this point, as much as BoomTown has warned about the impact of the financial crisis on Silicon Valley, the meltdown in tech shares is beginning to feel a little undeserved and overdone.

After all, does anyone doubt most advertising will move online? Or that tech will not continue to permeate all sectors of our society and economy in the decades ahead? Or that digital companies, for all their fattening up of late, are not the most adept at adapting themselves to leaner times?

After all, everyone in tech did learn a thing or two from the bursting of the last bubble, which was entirely appropriate.

This time, while the industry had begun to party like it was 1999, the more recent expansion–aside from the lofty valuations for start-ups–was done in a way that will make it much easier to cut back.

I kind of feel like I might be channeling Chip Diller, the annoying ROTC cadet in “Animal House” (played by Kevin Bacon), with his famous line, “All is well, remain calm,” even as all hell was breaking loose around him (see video below).

But with a little rejiggering, it’s still the right prescription for the months ahead. In the short term, all is not well.

Nonetheless: Remain calm.