
Email traffic data casts doubt on global village theory - Anon84
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/23717/
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mixmax
_"They studied the messaging habits of 100,000 Facebook users by zip code"_

This skews the study substantially. My facebook friends are my old classmates,
colleagues, family and friends. Most of them are people that live close to
where I do.

My e-mail habits are very different. Businesswise I probably correspond with
more people abroad than in my own country.

The sample determines the output - and in this case the sample isn't
representative of all online communications.

~~~
idlewords
The sample is also much smaller than the article suggests. The paper itself
says they found about 1800 'linked pairs' of users with a stated ZIP code in
that sample of 100K. And in the graphs for the larger (4500) sample of email
data, the fit is quite bad, with a pronounced 'hump' in the tail. There are
just far too few sample points here to make these kinds of sweeping
conclusions.

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d0mine
Alternative title: Study shows we all gravitate to each other

    
    
               m1 m2
      p(r) = G -----
                r^2
    

where p(r) is a probability of a social link between two specific individuals
with a distance r between them and m1, m2 their individual susceptibilities of
being linked. <http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0906/0906.3202.pdf>

~~~
Anon84
"Gravity" laws are actually common in many real case scenarios (like
transportation networks, etc).

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drenei
I think the conclusion fits neatly in to a different idea: more time is spent
on relationships that are of greater value. (I don't equate value and returns
- you could have a harmful relationship that you greatly value)

And with communication getting easier, maybe so does the realization that it
is easier to find value in in-person relationships.

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jgrahamc
I wonder why they did this just on Facebook. Why not get access to real email
logs, look in the Received: headers and do geo-location on the IP addresses.
I'm sure if you looked in my email you'd see all sorts of messages coming from
all over the world.

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shalmanese
Eric Gilbert has analyzed facebook friending vs geography and found it also
followed a power law distribution. Wouldn't the correct interpretation be then
that we're indifferent to geography for anyone we're already friends with?

