LA12388
Gossip Tipping Point: the more popular a news item is, the faster it is passed around.
Information popularity and propagation speed go together. The paper "Impact of human activity patterns on information diffusion dynamics" analyzes the propagation dynamics of viral marketing campaigns run through social networks and proves that the speed in forwarding a viral message increases dramatically when its forwarding rate exceeds the spreading process tipping-point. Thus, popular messages will not only reach a majority of the public but will do so in a matter of hours compared to the days or months it would take a less interesting message to reach a much smaller fraction of the audience. The importance of the result is that the phenomenon is traced to the large heterogeneity of human behavior since, for widely forwarded messages, fast reacting individuals are more abundant than those with average response times. On the contrary, if information is not very appealing, its speed is controlled by those people who take a lot of time to respond, slowing down the propagation to the extend that it can take years to spread. This finding will have a great impact in the understanding and modeling of information diffusion in social processes like rumor spreading, opinion formation, diffusion of innovations, marketing tactics, business cooperation or cultural dynamics.
