<story><title>Friendship Paradox</title><url>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendship_paradox</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jiggy2011</author><text>I wonder if this can be exploited for business networking purposes. Simply choose a person in your &amp;quot;network&amp;quot; and ask them to introduce you to one other person they know and repeat with the new person.</text></item><item><author>murbard2</author><text>This is established by making a one-step random walk in the friendship graph.&lt;p&gt;Things get more interesting when you start taking longer walks. If you take a long enough walk in a (strongly connected) graph, the probability of ending up in a particular place becomes independent of your starting point.&lt;p&gt;In fact, social graphs are said to be &amp;quot;fast-mixing&amp;quot;, which means that &amp;quot;long enough&amp;quot; is typically only O(log n). In contrast, if you were walking in a two dimensional lattice, &amp;quot;long enough&amp;quot; would be O(sqrt n). This is the idea behind the &amp;quot;6 degrees of separation&amp;quot; factoid.&lt;p&gt;So what is the limiting probability distribution? That&amp;#x27;s actually the pagerank.&lt;p&gt;Which means that if friends randomly pass on a token, it&amp;#x27;s likely to end up in the hands of someone very influential with a lot of friends. It&amp;#x27;s been used for vaccine delivery.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>VLM</author><text>&amp;quot;for business networking purposes&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Why not online matchmaking &amp;#x2F; dating?  Not being in that market I have no idea if this already exists, if not it sounds like a great idea for a startup.  Or if it already crashed and burned that would be interesting to hear about.&lt;p&gt;So ... guys ... I have this unattached sister in law, kinda athletic, professionally employed, owns her own house, she is about as much of a PITA as her sister, aka my wife, so if I can put up with my wife you should be able to tolerate her little sister ...&lt;p&gt;From historical experience my attempts setting up blind dates between my SiL and guys I know, have all gotten shot down by my wife, aka her sister, with what summarizes to &amp;quot;WTF were you thinking&amp;quot;.  Assuming a similarity between matchmaking and business relationships, this might indicate issues with peer to peer connection building.  At least a meta-moderation facility is likely needed.&lt;p&gt;Also if A sets up a hot date or business lunch between mutual friends B and C I could conceivably lose both B and C as friends if they hate each other.  So in a game theory perspective the guy who does the least matchmaking comes out furthest ahead, right?  But the purpose of the site was to do matchmaking, at least in theory and in PR.  Although the real purpose would be to sell subscriptions and ads.  I think I&amp;#x27;m seeing another problem here.</text></comment>
<story><title>Friendship Paradox</title><url>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendship_paradox</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jiggy2011</author><text>I wonder if this can be exploited for business networking purposes. Simply choose a person in your &amp;quot;network&amp;quot; and ask them to introduce you to one other person they know and repeat with the new person.</text></item><item><author>murbard2</author><text>This is established by making a one-step random walk in the friendship graph.&lt;p&gt;Things get more interesting when you start taking longer walks. If you take a long enough walk in a (strongly connected) graph, the probability of ending up in a particular place becomes independent of your starting point.&lt;p&gt;In fact, social graphs are said to be &amp;quot;fast-mixing&amp;quot;, which means that &amp;quot;long enough&amp;quot; is typically only O(log n). In contrast, if you were walking in a two dimensional lattice, &amp;quot;long enough&amp;quot; would be O(sqrt n). This is the idea behind the &amp;quot;6 degrees of separation&amp;quot; factoid.&lt;p&gt;So what is the limiting probability distribution? That&amp;#x27;s actually the pagerank.&lt;p&gt;Which means that if friends randomly pass on a token, it&amp;#x27;s likely to end up in the hands of someone very influential with a lot of friends. It&amp;#x27;s been used for vaccine delivery.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jgmmo</author><text>Like Conspire?&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goconspire.com/welcome&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.goconspire.com&amp;#x2F;welcome&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>