25 Things I Didn't Want to Know About You

This article from TIME magazine talks about the "25 Random Things About Yourself" fad that has been going around Facebook lately, where users receive instructions to post 25 facts about themselves that they don't think their friends would know. Then they forward the same instructions to 25 of their friends, and so on. This relates to what we talked about in the first lecture, about how diseases (or in this case, lists) can spread across huge networks in short periods of time. The article mentions: "An estimated 5 million of these notes — that's 125 million facts — have appeared on the website within the past week." Here's the link:
http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1877187,00.html

What I find interesting about this story is that the actual people that these facts reach are far more than what is being documented. We can only see the total amount of facts, hence only the people who received a notification and actually responded by posting facts of their own. I’ve received several invitations to do this but have declined every time, but what would really be interesting to see is not how many people have posted facts, but how many people have received notifications about posting facts.

Another interesting thing to look at would be how people acted when they got notified - how many wrote a note themselves and how many ignored it. If even nearly as many people who got tagged filled out the same note there would be an astronomical amount of notes soon after that. From what I've seen, a lot of people have ignored the note and not written their own -- keeping the number at 5 million notes. Also, another networking thing to look at is how many overlaps there were between friends where you got tagged several times from different people?

this also makes me think of the strength of the ties, obviously you will only tag your closest friends an not the random guy you had 10th grade gym with. In my experience, I was tagged multiple times but it wasn't until one of my best friends tagged about 10 of my other closest friends that I decided it might be a fun thing to do (and yes, I also tagged the same 10-ish friends the original poster had tagged), so the network didn't necessarily increase in my case.

The strength of ties definitely do come into play here. If we all tag the same 10-ish friends, then the "virus" will take longer to spread because it won't make full use of weak ties; it will use only strong ties. The instructions strategically tell us to pass it on to 25 other people. This will generally exhaust the 10-ish friends that make up our strong ties and force users to scrounge up some weak ties. In this manner, the weak ties can push the virus further and faster through the network.