Facebook and The Tipping Point

We had a meeting with our rep from Facebook a week or so ago, and she mentioned something to me that is probably screamingly obvious, but had never occured to me.

The average person on Facebook has around 160 friends, and each of those friends are doing between five and ten actions each day that could potentially go into a news feed.  So clearly Facebook is doing some clever filtering to make sure that the twenty or so items in your news feed are actually interesting to you.

Their algorithm is looking for people in your network that you seem to have the closest connection with.  It will be looking at cross-posting on each other's pages, tagging of photos, numbers of friends in common etc.

The Tipping Point talks about mavens, who are often the first to pick up on new trends, and connectors, who help mavens to spread their message.  And the definition of connectors sounds a lot like these 'hot nodes' on Facebook: this definition from Wikipedia:

"...people who have wide network of casual acquaintances by whom they are trusted, often a network that crosses many social boundaries and groups."

So if you want to get actions into the news feed - as many applications do - you particularly need to be appealing to these 'Facebook connectors'.  Naturally there's already a Facebook application, socialistics, that will tell you who in your network is most relevant to you (in case you can't work it out for yourself!) Add to:

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