You clearly have easy, credible access to a much bigger node in the network than a lot of people.

Today, a friend of mine shared a post with me, which I shared with the friend who retweeted it yesterday. He in turn shared the link on Twitter, which Tyler Cowen saw and then linked to on Marginal Revolution.

It seems to me that either I live an extraordinarily improbable life, your study doesn’t correctly capture the odds that something will jump more than one or two degrees, or I’m completely misinterpreting your results.

Much of the connection on Twitter etc is very superficial. BUT if a real friend of mine was excited about an idea and told me I would listen.

For instance – I have been on a Paleo diet for 9 months now. I blog a lot about it but don’t push it. Many of my real friends have seen how well I am – see that they share my original risk – and now are on it too. But I have had very little luck in persuading any who are more distant. They on the other hand are having some success in persuading their other real friends…

The cases of advanced HIV disease observed in 1981 were, in fact, the first to be clustered and presented to Western doctors who would “put the pieces together,” not those that began the pandemic. The wasting effects of HIV, commonly known as “slim,” had already been recounted in the oral histories of sub-Saharan Africa for over two generations, particularly among female sex workers in urban brothels. Economic conditions in Africa, driven by the hunger of colonial powers for timber, minerals, and other natural resources, drew people into urban centers early in the 20th Century as HIV was making its way from first human contact to the cities. There, HIV found ideal hosts among local sex workers and their transient partners, men who would often carry the virus to other cities and back to smaller villages. Unwittingly, these non-drug-using heterosexuals became the first cases of HIV disease that would spark the pandemic.

* Facebook: is it reasonable to use one app’s content diffusion on Facebook as a proxy for content diffusion on Facebook as a whole? I’d argue that it isn’t, there are different distribution channels on Facebook, different ways to implement an app, differently compelling app content, all of which should result in differing levels of “virality”.

Twitter:
* Is it possible there was a large amount of spam, diluting the # of diffusion trees (because no one chose to diffuse the spam links)? What does a sampling of the studied Tweets look like?
* Ditto, but for content that just wasn’t successful – there was only one adopter of the bit.ly link (in other words – that no diffusion at all occurred).
* What is the definition of an “adoption”? By “the vast majority of adoptions occur either without peer-to-peer influence or within one step”, do you mean that one person posts a link, someone who is not following that person reposts the link, and that constitutes an independent adoption? Or is the first posting of the bit.ly link itself an adoption, meaning that the case where two people independently post a bit.ly link = two adoptions? If so the pool of successful adoptions would be diluted by garbage content, or just un-viral content – content that had no distribution tree at all, viral or otherwise.