Characterizing social cascades in flickr

Online social networking sites like MySpace and Flickr have become a popular way to share and disseminate content. Their massive popularity has led to the viral marketing of content, products, and political campaigns on the sites themselves. Despite the excitement, the precise mechanisms by which information is exchanged over these networks are not well understood. In this paper, we investigate social cascades, or how information disseminates through social links in online social networks. Using real traces of 1,000 popular photos and a social network collected from Flickr, and a theoretical framework borrowed from epidemiology, we show that social cascades are an important factor in the dissemination of content. Our work provides an important first step in understanding how information disseminates in social networks.