Second Life data offers window into how trends spread

This study is one of the first to model social influence in a virtual world because of the rarity of having access to information about how information, assets or ideas propagate. In Second Life, the previous owner of a gesture is listed.

The researchers also found that the gestures that spread from friend to friend were not distributed as broadly as ones that were distributed outside of the social network, such as those acquired in stores or as give-aways.

And they discovered that the early adopters of gestures who are among the first 5-10 percent to acquire new assets are not the same as the influencers, who tend to distribute them most broadly. This aligns with what social scientists have found.

"In our study, we sought to develop a more rigorous understanding of social processes that underlies many cultural and economic phenomena," Bakshy said. "While some of our findings may seem quite intuitive, what I find most exciting is that we were actually able to test some rather controversial and competing hypotheses about the role of social networks in influence."

The researchers examined 130 days worth of gesture transfers in late 2008 and early 2009. They looked at 100,229 users and 106,499 gestures. They obtained the data from Linden Lab, the maker of Second Life. Personally-identifying information had been removed.

The paper is called, "Social Influence and the Diffusion of User-Created Content." The research is funded by the National Science Foundation. Physics graduate student Brian Karrer is also a co-author.

For more information:

Full text of paper:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~ladamic/

ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce:
http://www.sigecom.org/ec09/