Understanding the adoption process of an idea, a product or an app, as it circulates over an online social network (OSN) could let us better plan advertisement campaigns or even steer that adoption process. How does an idea spread? What features drive it? What role do influential people play? A recent New York Times article 1 discusses how traditional retailers are partnering with OSN companies to leverage the growing number of shoppers wandering around the aisles, cellphone in hand. Once in an OSN, most chief marketing officers would surely love to know how to most effectively spread the news of their latest sale event and which customers, if any, should be paid special attention. Trying to answer such questions through an empirical study of social behavior on a popular OSN is a challenge. Even if one can collect the necessary data at scale, despite the obvious privacy concerns, there is still the need to capture all the different channels that could be used for advertisement and recruitment within an OSN, such as emails, news feeds and application requests (AR). The authors have managed to do just that. They got their hands on an impressive dataset from a popular Facebook "gifting" application, extending over 64 weeks and covering the major lifespan of the app. Since gifting apps solely use ARs for inter-user communication, and all ARs are part of this dataset, their analysis accounts for all communication (of course only within the OSN). Besides the apt timing, impressive dataset and clever methodology, the reviewers remarked the interesting measurements of the cascade phenomenon (a chain of adoptions initiated by a seed user) and some of their intriguing findings. These include, for instance, the fact that the out-degree of a seed user does not correlate with the size of the cascade it initiates and that neither does the fact that a seed initiated a large cascade indicates that this seed caused it. There were not clear weaknesses pointed out, but a general concern about the validity of the authors' observations in other applications, with different dynamics and social strategies to stimulate adoption. Public review written by Northwestern University, USA  E. Harris, Retailers Seek Partners in Social Networks Online social network (OSN) based applications often rely on user interactions to propagate information or to recruit more users, producing a sequence of user actions called adoption process or cascades. This paper presents the first attempt to quantitatively study the adoption process or cascade of such OSN-based applications by analyzing detailed user activity data from a popular Facebook gifting application. In particular, due to the challenge of monitoring user interactions over all possible channels on OSN platforms, we focus on characterizing the adoption process that relies only on user-based invitation (which is applicable to most gifting applications). We characterize the adoptions by tracking the invitations sent by the existing users to their friends through the Facebook gifting application and the events when their friends install the application for the first time. We found that a small number of big cascades carry the adoption of most of the application users. Contrary to common beliefs, we did not observe special influential nodes that are responsible for the viral adoption of the application.
Recently, Rahman et al. investigated the role of the seeds in the adoption process of the Facebook gifting application, and showed that large-scale adoptions are not correlated to well-known properties of seeds (such as out-degree or active lifetime) REF .
Peeking into the invitation-based adoption process of OSN-based applications
CCRV
Computer Science