De retibus socialibus et legibus momenti^a

¹ University of Oviedo, Facultad de Ciencias - C/Calvo Sotelo s/n, 33007 Oviedo, Spain, EU
² Simplelogica, SL - C/Fray Ceferino, 18 1° Derecha, 33001 Oviedo, Spain, EU

^b dani@uniovi.es

Received: 14 December 2010
Accepted: 21 March 2011

Abstract

Online Social Networks (OSNs) are a cutting edge topic. Almost everybody —users, marketers, brands, companies, and researchers— is approaching OSNs to better understand them and take advantage of their benefits. Maybe one of the key concepts underlying OSNs is that of influence which is highly related, although not entirely identical, to those of popularity and centrality. Influence is, according to Merriam-Webster, “the capacity of causing an effect in indirect or intangible ways”. Hence, in the context of OSNs, it has been proposed to analyze the clicks received by promoted URLs in order to check for any positive correlation between the number of visits and different “influence” scores. That evaluation methodology is used in this letter to compare a number of those techniques with a new method firstly described here. That new method is a simple and rather elegant solution which tackles with influence in OSNs by applying a physical metaphor.