2:35 p.m. - 2003-09-19
on friendster mathematics, #1
friendster has reached this nice little critical mass where every so often i check it, i have a couple thousand more people in my personal network without me really doing anything at all. it's fun to watch. someone should do a study on the growth of personal networks over time, plotting the curve. this would allow you to compare people's ways of using friendster: the maniacal, competitive friend-collectors would presumably demonstrate a much more continually sustained growth curve, while the more casual, sincere users like myself would taper off after a relatively short time.
however! the practical properties of this situation mandate a fairly broad study. that is: any individual's friendster growth curve is going to be affected by a number of unique factors. these include the number of friends they have who are already on the service checking it regularly, their willingness to add fakesters (who tend to be very widely connected), how much their immediate friendsters bother to get widely connected, and (most difficult to even think about modeling) the degree to which their first two layers of friendsters are connected *to each other*. to name but a few. since these distortions are mostly unavoidable and achingly complex where they can be dealt with, the best approach would be to study a great number of individual users and hope to find general "pattern" curves from a synthesis of the results...
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