

Is the Tipping Point Toast?  - latif
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/122/is-the-tipping-point-toast.html

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brandnewlow
Here's my takeaway from this piece:

"Why didn't the Influentials wield more power? With 40 times the reach of a
normal person, why couldn't they kick-start a trend every time? Watts believes
this is because a trend's success depends not on the person who starts it, but
on how susceptible the society is overall to the trend--not how persuasive the
early adopter is, but whether everyone else is easily persuaded. And in fact,
when Watts tweaked his model to increase everyone's odds of being infected,
the number of trends skyrocketed."

This sure seems to back up Adreessen's argument that market opportunity is the
single most important factor in considering an opportunity.

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waterlesscloud
This whole article rests on the idea that reach (number of followers) equals
influence.

Twitter pretty much proves that wrong right out of the gate, so why is anyone
debating it?

This says absolutely nothing about whether people with real influence (which
isn't the same thing at all as number of connections) affect things.

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Tichy
Does Twitter disprove that? A lot of people with many followers on Twitter
have mostly fake followers. I think people with a lot of real followers do
have influence on Twitter.

For example a friend of mine bought a band's new album just because @veronica
mentioned that she liked them. @veronica has 1500000 followers on Twitter. I
think for a band it can make a real difference if she mentions them.

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zaidf
I tend to agree with the straw man accusation leveled against Watts. His
research seems to be an extension of theories of influence, not so much
contradictory. But if he didn't pitch it as a war, he wouldn't get media
coverage such as this article itself.

Watts' main problem is that the Influence lobby sees _one_ type of influential
people when there are _degrees_ of influential people. Complete farce: the
Influence lobby itself is not one big bubble; it has lots of different
theories, many of which talk about _degrees_ and _levels_ of social influence.

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10ren
So, whether a trend _starts_ depends more on the environment ("tinder-dry
forest") than on the starter ("careless smoker"); but you get a much _bigger_
trend if you start with an Influencer.

So you get more bang-per-buck from Influencers, right?

Seems like a conflict of intentions: science (wanting to understand the big
picture) vs. engineering (wanting to make something happen, efficiently).

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ahi
Watts isn't just some random researcher. His papers are required reading in
networks courses. Of course, he's an academic, and academics are boring so
fastcompany had to bulldoze some of the hemming and hawing.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watts_and_Strogatz_model>

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InclinedPlane
The problem I have with all of Gladwell's works (Blink, Tipping Point, etc.)
is that his theories are overly simplistic. They are formulated at the
cocktail party level, they make interesting stories but they are not
sufficiently well thought out or detailed to actually make testable
predictions or be useful in any practical sense. This is a shame because some
of the things he studies (especially in Blink) is potentially very important
and well done research could have wide ranging positive influence.

Ultimately though Gladwell proves himself as not a scientist, and seemingly
content to just write interesting stories rather than to do the less glamorous
work of fleshing out his ideas into something of practical value.

~~~
snprbob86
Gladwell clearly has a gift for writing interesting stories. Maybe he is also
capable of being a great scientist, but I don't think he needs to be. The
practical usefulness is twofold:

1\. His works serve as food for thought. There are far too many topics for one
man to research them all. Providing inspiration for further research is a
worthwhile endeavor as well.

2\. He provides thought frameworks. He reminds me of an old wise man. His
writing contains key ideas, while not based on scientific fact, which are
useful as rules of thumb. Sometimes decisiveness and confidence is more
important than correctness or optimality. Tribal knowledge has its place.

~~~
adsyoung
Agreed, I wish the world had more like him. Even when wrong, he's wrong in
interesting ways and we end up learning something new.

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10ren
print <http://www.fastcompany.com/node/641124/print>

