May 2007 - Structure and tie strengths in mobile communication networks
Electronic databases, from phone to emails logs, currently provide detailed records
of human communication patterns, offering novel avenues to map and explore the structure
of social and communication networks. Here we examine the communication patterns of millions
of mobile phone users, allowing us to simultaneously study the local and the global structure
of a society-wide communication network. We observe a coupling between interaction strengths
and the network’s local structure, with the counterintuitive consequence that social networks
are robust to the removal of the strong ties, but fall apart following a phase transition if
the weak ties are removed. We show that this coupling significantly slows the diffusion
process, resulting in dynamic trapping of information in communities, and find that when it
comes to information diffusion, weak and strong ties are both simultaneously ineffective.
Main paper (Preprint)
More technical paper
New Scientist Coverage
Spiegel Online Coverage