Post: #1

Quote:Back in 1991, the sociologist Scott Feld made a surprising discovery while studying the properties of social networks. Feld calculated the average number of friends that a person in the network has and compared this to the average number of friends that these friends had.

Against all expectations it turned out that the second number is always bigger than the first. Or in other words, your friends have more friends than you do.

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/523...n-you-are/

Post: #2

This is actually an obvious fact. The reason for this is that social networks have a small number of "hubs", which are nodes that are connected to a very large number of other nodes, as well as a lot of isolated nodes that are only connected to a hub.

Imagine a social network consisting of 100 people. One of them, let's call him "Roosh", is friends with all other 99. The other 99 who might have names like "Ali" or "el mechanico" or "McQueen" have no friends besides Roosh.

In this social network the average number of friends per member is a little less than 2. But the average number of friends that a friend of a member has is close to 99, since the friend of a member is always Roosh!

This is extreme, because in reality Ali has one other friend. But it illustrates the idea.