
Is Justin Timberlake a Product of Cumulative Advantage? - pg
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/15/magazine/15wwlnidealab.t.html?ex=1334203200&en=79be2f770fc76c6d&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink&pagewanted=all
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dhbradshaw
I think this model implies a certain marketing strategy. While achieving a
critical mass might be impossible (read unlikely and hard to control) if you
try for the world as a whole, it may be possible for a smaller one. Once you
have a small group that is largely converted you can add other groups in such
a way that you don't put out the fire by separating members of the first
group.

It may be that a large part of the success of Facebook comes from the way they
were able to use student bodies as small, self-contained networks, and then
build from there.

It reminds me of building a fire with charcoals. If you keep them together you
can keep them burning. If you can get a nice group going you can add to it bit
by bit and build as big as you want. If you disperse them they die.

Our world has a million little self-contained networks. If you try to win some
over perhaps some will succeed to the point that the network works for you.
Then maybe you can add others.

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zaidf
I blogged this last night about how it pertains to what we're doing:
<http://www.zaid360.com/?p=143>

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aston
Cool feature of NYT online I just discovered: If you double click a word,
it'll define it for you in a pop up window.

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Benja
And closer to home: Is Google?

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danielha
How so?

If you want close to home, think news.yc or other social news sites when it
comes to cumulative advantage.

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Benja
Your point is that news.yc and other social news sites are actually _more
useful_ when more people use them, right? I agree with that. But IMHO, that's
missing the point of the article.

Music doesn't _objectively_ get better just because more people listen to it;
and yet, the authors' research appears to show that people's opinions of music
is hugely influenced by what other people like. Recall their main result: They
had one group of users who they didn't show any information about how often a
song was downloaded, and then eight independent groups who were shown the
download count of each song inside that group. "The song 'Lockdown,' by
52metro, for example, ranked 26th out of 48 in [the group not shown download
counts]; yet it was the No. 1 song in one social-influence world, and 40th in
another. Overall, a song in the Top 5 in [the group not shown counts] had only
a 50 percent chance of finishing in the Top 5 of success." Their conclusion is
that the reason why predicting the success of media products is shaky is that
what's a success is hugely influenced by an unpredictable feedback process.

Thus, my question: Can we assume that Google's success is due in a large part
not to anything that Google did, but to the (random) feedback process of
people liking Google because they see other people liking Google?

Of course, one could argue that this is simply the truism that one needs luck
as well as talent to succeed. But I come away from reading the article with
the feeling that I've learned something that goes deeper than that, and I'm
trying to figure out how to apply it to the tech world.

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blader
I think what Daniel is saying is that on social news sites, popular posts tend
be popular because they're popular.

I don't think we can attribute Google's success to cumulative effects:

I suspect that you can see cumulative advantage effects only when objective
quality is difficult or impossible to measure. Taste in music is extremely
subjective - it's very difficult to measure the quality of music independent
of its popularity.

On the other hand, the objective quality of search results can be measured by
independent testing and feedback - it's not perfect - but you can get a much
better measurement of quality for search than you can for music.

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blader
One word: MySpace.

