Social Networks and patterns

No more poetry, I promise. For sometime at least :-).

I have spend at least a dozen hours in last one week going around orkut randomly. Well, not randomly, there are so many interesting games you can make out of randomness. Like you visit the top most friend of the person you are visiting now and see if you come back to familiar circle or not. If you do, you find out a new way of connections that you didn't know existed before. Or you can surf going only through girls/boys profiles which at time can hit a road block.

While doing all this, I see patterns, very vague ones and in almost all the cases, false ones owing to the nature of human brain which does a selecting strengthening of evidence. But they are interesting anyway. One of those observations is that a good looking person also seems to have on average, good looking (or photogenic if you want to be technically correct) friends. Another one is that often people who have not put up their own picture in profile , will have more friends of similar kind. As you can see, these observations are wrong right on their face. Of course, for any one example in favor, you will find thousands against it.

However my guess is that it still occurs more often than you would expect it to be out of pure chance. That is, given that there is nothing special happening, even then by a sheer chance of luck, you may come across a person who has above characteristic. You may expect to find only one such person in 10k people. My guess is you will find more than one. Has anybody else observed something similar?

Comments

Gauraw said…
Looks like others are not so keen in finding such vague patterns :p
March 8, 2007 at 10:20 PM
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