The Whole Truth About Social Networks


Timo had recently wondered why there were so few registrations for the Lunch 2.0 September in Hamburg, where it was usually full faster than some would have liked; one explanation was that people in Hamburg already meet all the time and know everyone. Only at the legendary Gimahhot party would there have been other people. What Timo has experienced here is a fundamental characteristic of communities that can be observed in every scale-free network, and this is also evident in another example I mentioned in the Web 2.0 book, namely linking within the blogosphere. In the German blogosphere, not everyone is networked with everyone. There are many pages with few links and few pages with many links. However, having a lot of inbound links is not enough to be a multiplier. Because if you take a close look at the graphic, which I created using my own crawler and GraphViz, there are different centers in the blogosphere that are more or less well connected to each other. This means that a piece of information may be hotly debated in one region of the blogosphere, but does not make it to the rest of the blogosphere due to the few connections to another region. So what is more interesting are the nodes that have connections to several regions, as they are the ones that can act as multipliers (they are also called hubs). Let’s transfer this to a human network away from the blogosphere. How do you find a new job? Not through your closest friends, because they usually only have access to the information you have yourself. It is the less good acquaintances who have access to another (information) circle and can help them get a new job (this clever idea, as well as many others about communities and social networks, come from Albert-Laszlo Barabasis’s book Linked). And the more contacts they have with different clusters, the more likely they are to know someone who is looking for someone with exactly the same qualifications as you have. But doesn’t everyone know everyone over 6 corners anyway? What about the six degrees of separation? A myth has developed here that, if you take a closer look, seems sobering. There was actually this study that everyone refers to, and it comes from Stanley Milgram, who sent letters to people in the USA in the 60s asking them to forward them to a specific target person or to someone who might know this target person. And indeed, on average, the letters took 5.5 stations to reach the target person. The flaw, however, is that of the 160 letters sent, only 42 arrived. In some cases, it took almost a dozen stations for the letter to arrive. So is that not true with the 6 stations after all? You don’t know, I would say. After all, those who received a letter to forward always forwarded it to people they thought might know the target. So it could be that there were much shorter paths through the network. This or something similar happens to us when we look at XING through whom we could know a person if we didn’t already have them as a contact ourselves: “What, they know each other too?”. In addition, today, with modern communication methods and cheap flights, the number of stations between two people may actually have decreased. But we don’t know exactly. More on that in a moment. By the way, the term “Six Degrees of Separation” was never used by Stanley Milgram; it only became popular through the film of the same name. Why don’t we know today how many stations lie between us and another person, especially if they live in another country? (Milgram’s experiment took place in only 3 states in the USA) Because there is no social network on the web that really connects different social networks (across countries). There are thoughts in different companies about how to do this, but until then, the clusters of the various social networks are rather “manually” connected to each other. Example: I have some XING contacts, and I have some LinkedIn contacts. Two networks for the same thing. In fact? No, the overlap of my contacts in the two networks is low. Likewise, the overlap between this network and my Last.fm friends is low. I am a human being (like any other person) who is part of different communities, and I am the link between these communities. Does this mean that I can ensure that information gets from one community to another? Maybe, but not in every case, because not every community is receptive to the information from another community. And in some cases, I have to do “manually” to connect the two different networks. The digitally mapped networks still need analog connections in order to be able to map the connections in the real network. The people who can really help you (or bring you a PR disaster) are the ones who have the most contacts in as many different communities as possible, in real as well as in digital life, and actively cultivate them and don’t just let them rest in the address book. These are the people who make Hush Puppies fashionable again (see also Malcolm Gladwell’s excellent book The Tipping Point). However, these hubs or multipliers or connectors are not the ones that produce innovations themselves. But they are the ones who help innovations break through by spreading information about them to the various clusters they know. And those who can help you get a new job. For Lunch 2.0, for example, this could mean that one of the participating hubs has to bring other people that no one knows yet. A blind business date, for example. XING is used to check whether the participants are in direct contact with each other, and if not, they are allowed to participate. This allows anyone to connect to another cluster.