David K.K. a friend on facebook got my attention when contacted me two days ago stating his interest to have his events published on ThingsToDoSingapore.com. I instructed him that by simply signing in as a member on ThingsToDoSingapore.com, the system will automatically poll his account and his friends’ accounts for newly created events every 24 hours. Just for curiosities sake I went and did a manual polling for his account after getting his account id. To my surprise his account itself contributed close to 300 new upcoming events. To gain more understanding of this phenomena, I went and did a study on David K.K.’s facebook profile. Results showed he is one of the top ten members who have the most number of friends on ThingsToDoSingapore.com. This fact brought immediately to my mind a key point which I ever came across from the book “The Tipping Point”.
All individuals are not equal by nature, the differences could be attributed to their character, personality and natural disposition, as such when analysed in the context of the social network, some people are spokes (connected with just a few main people) while other people are hubs (connected to many people). According to the theory preached in the tipping point, to gain wide coverage for a message, it is important to gather the support of people that are hubs in a particular section of a social network as ambassadors of a sticky message.
After gaining this new insight, I modified a section of my codes to prioritize the polling of members accounts for events based on their number of friends.