Twitter changed my life. As an introvert I have never been eager to talk about myself. But on Twitter it’s different. At times it seems the channel from my brain to my Twitter feed is wider than the one between Holland and Britain. And I have to take care that my social networking activities on-line aren’t taking over my “normal” life in the physical world, where my off-line social network has a size comparable to a meter box. Research into network theory and social network analysis has uncovered a number of interesting phenomena in (both on-line and off-line) social networks. For example: a tipping point is the moment in time when something which was previously rare suddenly becomes widespread across an entire population, like the popularity of the Avatar movie, the Susan Boyle video, the Harry Potter books, or… my book. (I’m Twittering about the book until my fingers turn blue, so I’m sure it’s not my fault when it won’t fly.) In physics the tipping point is called a phase transition, but the meaning is the same: a sudden transformation of a system from one state to another. A second example is the strength of weak ties, which says that information often better reaches populations in a network through many weak connections instead of few strong ones. Twitter followers are a perfect example of weak ties. They sometimes talk to me, but they never ruin my good mood with birthday party invitations. And then there is the example of … Continue reading Network Effects: Waiting for the Tipping Point