Competition among memes in a world with limited attention

he wide adoption of social media has increased the competition among ideas for our finite attention. We employ a parsimonious agent-based model to study whether such a competition may affect the popularity of different memes, the diversity of information we are exposed to, and the fading of our collective interests for specific topics. Agents share messages on a social network but can only pay attention to a portion of the information they receive. In the emerging dynamics of information diffusion, a few memes go viral while most do not. The predictions of our model are consistent with empirical data from Twitter, a popular microblogging platform. Surprisingly, we can explain the massive heterogeneity in the popularity and persistence of memes as deriving from a combination of the competition for our limited attention and the structure of the social network, without the need to assume different intrinsic values among ideas.

140 Executives or Less

Life inside successful startups—especially the really successful ones—can be nasty, brutish, and short. As companies grow exponentially, egos clash, investors jockey for control, and business complexities rapidly exceed the managerial abilities of the founders. But, years of chaos and fail whales hasn’t stopped Twitter.

“Siamo tutti qui! Nessuna defezione!”

Nine Major Takeaways About Online Reputation

Scusate per il disguido

The Anatomy of a hashtag [just in case you didn’t know]

Super Tuesday Twitter Results Are In

This chart maps the conversation about each of the candidates over the course of the day. You can see the volume of Tweets increase sharply around the time the first results were reported, and additional lifts as each candidate addressed citizens and voters on TV.

[More hints on soDOMM - The Social Distribution of Mass Media]

55% of Twitter users use mobile, 40% just consume tweets 

How Many [Active] Users Does Twitter REALLY Have?