A Measurement-driven Analysis of Information Propagation in the Flickr Social Network

by Cha et al. (cha2009) at the WWW 2009

The authors present a study on viral information propagation which is based on crawls of the favorite markings of 2.5 million flickr users on 11 million photos. The authors try to use this data to address the following three questions:

• how widely does information propagate in social networks,
• how quickly does it propagate,
• what is the role of word-of-mouth exchange between friends

Contrary to common beliefs the paper identified that

• even popular photos only spread slowly and for short distances through the network
• information exchange between friends amounts for over 50% of all favorite markings with a significant delay between hops

The paper contains a detailed description of information propagation alongside social links which is based upon the author's observations on the evolution of picture popularity.

Related Work:

• diffusion in blogsphere based on keywords (gruhl2004) and links embedded in the post (adar2005)