Social Influence and the Diffusion of User Created Content

Eytan, Brian and I have a paper at EC (to be presented by Eytan @ Stanford in July).
It’s on the diffusion of gestures in Second Life (the online massively-multiplayer virtual world). The neat thing about SL users passing assets around is that it leaves digital traces. We were able to surmise that roughly half of the transfers occur between friends (according to the explicit social graph), and that in 38% of the remaining cases a user adopts after their a friend does. Not only that, but as more friends adopt, the hazard of adopting increases. Transfers along the social network are faster, but the overall spread is more limited… Influencers and adopters are distinct groups… What else? Well, you’ll have to read the paper 🙂.