Weak Ties

Mark Granovetter Model

More weak ties, more capable of acting in concert. Strong ties breed local cohesion and macro fragmentation.

Joi Ito: Strong ties are your family, friends and other people you have strong bonds to. Weak ties are relationships that transcend local relationship boundaries both socially and geographically. He writes about the importance of weak ties in the flow of information and does a study of job hunting and shows that jobs are more often found through weak ties than through strong ties. This obviously overlaps with the whole 6 degrees thing. I do believe there are some "nodes" but think that it is much more complex than a simple power law with a few number of local maximums.

Jon Udell: Books by Duncan Watts, Malcolm Gladwell, Albert Laszlo Barabasi, and Mark Buchanan have all popped up on All Consuming. But although we are talking a blue streak about small worlds, scale-free networks, connectors, social internetworking, and the strength of weak ties, I have a feeling we're still mostly preaching to the choir -- namely, each other.

Renee Hopkins Callahan: Social Networking and Innovation is the subject of a Stanford Business School study that says "disparate information and its transmission are keys to innovation." Study author Martin Ruef says weak ties "allow for more experimentation in combining ideas from disparate sources...." His research shows that "entrepreneurs who spend more time with a diverse network of strong and weak ties...are three times more likely to innovate than entrepreneurs stuck within a uniform network."