 | “Connectors” and “hubs” may be genetically inclinedJanuary 26th, 2009 |
I still pay a lot of attention to social networking theory (not the stuff about the sites, but the research around how humans form networks of influence), ever since doing all the research that led up to my 2003 “Small Worlds” presentation. So this Reuters report that scientists have found a genetic component to having tight friend clusters was interesting to me.
To dig into what’s going on here a little bit: social networks are very discontinuous. They “clump.” We know from datamining that some people have many friends and some have few. The ones who have many are often referred to as hubs or connectors. These folks are also often the ones that “bridge clumps.” And when we say they have friends, we mean, like, they have a crazy amount more than ordinary people do. (The distribution of “number of friends” follows a power law, so the folks at the high end are very very very rich with friends, to a radically disproportionate level).
I suppose it isn’t surprising to think that there is likely some genetic component to this aspect of it. Most people are not like those guys.
However, within any given social circle, there’s also the question of how tightly knit it is. Does everyone in the clump know each other, or are they mostly held together by the person in the middle? You could think of this as a “clumpiness” metric (it is technically called the “clustering coefficient” and it was developed by Watts & Strogatz). And that is what these folks found to have a genetic component, which I find fascinating. 
“We find that how interconnected your friends are depends on your genes. Some people have four friends who know each other and some people have four friends who don’t know each other. Whether Dick and Harry know each other depends on Tom’s genes,” Christakis said in a telephone interview.
…”We found there appears to be a genetic tendency to introduce your friends to each other,” Christakis said.
Relevance for anything useful? Well, singly-connected people tend to be at far greater risk of exiting a given social circle. And if you like, you can read that as “product or service” instead of social circle. If your highly connected friend is on Facebook, but you don’t know anyone else there, you are way more likely to stop using Facebook than if you are also connected to other people. So it would be to Facebook’s advantage if your friend were the sort of person who introduced you around; it makes it more likely that you’ll stick.
The flip side, of course, is that if that friend is the central node that matters the most in keeping those ties alive, she is more likely to take the entire group with her if she exits. This would be what we see in the “guild migration” phenomenon.
Alas (or hurrah), we don’t have genetic tests for users, so you can’t identify these users with a cotton swab just yet. (And I do say “yet.”) That said, you can identify these people through datamining; just search for clusters, then identify the most connected hub in a highly connected cluster and treat them preferentially to highly connected hubs in weakly connected clusters.
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[...] partially be genetically determined. I got the news from Raph Koster’s blog entry titled “Connectors” and “hubs” may be genetically inclined. Fascinating [...]