The evolution of Social networks and their undefined potential.

Among the many articles and stories one reads on a daily basis, there are certainly a few that merit a second, or sometimes even a third reading.

As did this story which I would like to highlight.

Harvard Graduate student Erez Leiberman, has propunded an Evolutionary Graph theory which is encouraging people to think about Social networks as an "evolving population."Developed in association with Harvard Mathematics Proffessor, Martin Nowark, who helped lay its foundation, it builds upon the work of previous mathemeticians Paul Erdos, Peter Clifford and Adian Sudbury.

Basically, on networks such as Facebook and Myspace, networks evolve as people influence one another( changing the configuration of the nodes)and also are new friendships are forged and developed.This can give rise to Pro Social behaviours and this is an idea now called 'network reciprocity'

But the fact is that its hard to quantify the influence that people exert.So according to Lieberman, the only way to predict how a social network will evolve is to construct an artificial one and track the flow of ideas within it.What is the likelihood of people 'forwarding' items that they receive on Facebook, for instance?..

So in principle, the idea that we really need to explore is "what is the likelihood of a particular stimulus within a social network leading to a particular response?" asks Leiberman?

If this gets more structured in terms of measurement criteria, he predicts a lot more organized marketing efforts on social networks as well as Systematic influence campaign.

Personally, I tend to agree...this theory could revolutionize the way Advertising and Marketing can be really made to work in 'not so distant' times...