From “Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks” (pdf). “Similarity breeds connection. This principle—the homophily principle—structures network ties of every type, including marriage, friendship, work, advice, support, information transfer, exchange, comembership, and other types of relationship.”
If you haven’t heard about The Seed Salon, here is your chance – it hosts scientific debates. This week, it features Barabasi and Fowler. “The physicist and the political scientist discuss contagion and the Obama campaign, debate the natural selection of robustness and ask whether society is turning inward.” Few highlights follow:
Recently, I’ve started to work on the problem of sybil attacks in mobile nets, and I came across this old discussion on identities in the Internet. The Snakes of Medusa and Cyberspace: Internet identity subversion.
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Idea of : Any device can request a location proof from the infrastructure when it is within communication range; the recipient device can then transmit the proof obtained from the infrastructure to any application that wishes to verify the device’s location.
Applications: store discounts for loyal customers (frequent visitors), green commuting proof, location-restricted content delivery, reducing fraud on auction websites, and police investigations (alibis producing).
I don’t know how it works but it seems to be a nice mobile testbed. Anyone knows more?
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From the Economist: Websites can now let visitors bring along their friends. A NEW button is appearing on some websites. It says “Facebook Connect” and saves visitors from having to fill out yet another tedious registration form, upload another profile picture and memorise another username and password. Instead, visitors can now sign into other sites using their existing identity on Facebook. …The big new idea, says Dave Morin, a Facebook Connect manager, is “dynamic privacy”. It means that, as the social network reaches out across the wider web, users will in theory take their privacy settings with them. Wherever on the web they are, they will be able to choose who among their friends will and won’t see what they are up to. As soon as a user demotes a “friend” from intimate to arm’s-length in his Facebook settings, this will also take effect on other sites.