Your friends have more friends than you do!

Steven Strogatz from Cornell is writing about the friendship paradox in social networks. Read this:

"You spend your time tweeting, friending, liking, poking, and in the few minutes left, cultivating friends in the flesh. Yet sadly, despite all your efforts, you probably have fewer friends than most of your friends have. But don’t despair — the same is true for almost all of us. Our friends are typically more popular than we are."

Don't believe it?  Read Steven's beautiful essay in the New York Times.

Steven has a lot more to say about (social) networks, and we will discuss some of his papers in class.

Watts going on with social contagion?

Diffusion in social networks (social contagion) is still one of the hot topics in IS and networks. What do we really know about social contagion and diffusion of trends, norms or product use? Duncan Watts says 1) we know little, 2) almost nothing really diffuses far in online settings, and 3) models of diffusion should integrate individual characteristics of the adopters. Great morning read. Looking forward to reading responds from the marketing and social media side to both papers!

Are your friends making you fat?

The New York Times has a nice discussion of social contagion and the spread of behavior in social networks. The text is from 2009 but still a good introduction to all interested in contagion, social networks, and what is actually spreading over social networks.

Link to the NYT article.

Twitter mood

Somewhat off-topic, but still worth a look. Using twitter to determine the mood of the nation (USA).

Click here for the full story...

Soziale Ansteckung in sozialen Netzwerken

Sinan Aral from NYU Stern talking about social contagion and influence in social networks. Somewhat more involved than the other material in this blog, but still a great talk and a must-see in this lecture.

Sinan Aral speaks at TEDx Silicon Valley 2011 from TEDx Silicon Valley on Vimeo.

Die Welt ist kleiner, als gedacht: 4.7 degrees of separation

Aus einem aktuellen Beitrag der New York Times:
Facebook, Pfadlängen, 6 degrees of separation.

"[The] researchers used a set of algorithms developed at the University of Milan to calculate the average distance between any two people by computing a vast number of sample paths among Facebook users. They found that the average number of links from one arbitrarily selected person to another was 4.74. In the United States, where more than half of people over 13 are on Facebook, it was just 4.37."

 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/22/technology/between-you-and-me-4-74-degrees.html?_r=2&hpw

Ranking stability and super-stable nodes in complex networks

Laszlo Barabasi at the Web Science Meets Network Science Workshop, talking about google pagerank and its inherent stability.

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfoE2kWHmI4