You give them far too much credit. They didn't formulate a problem, make some assumptions, and then come up with a solution based on it. What they did figure

You give them far too much credit. They didn't formulate a problem, make some assumptions, and then come up with a solution based on it. What they did figure out "slick approach to a well-known problem [in graph theory]" then sell it as something that viral marketers could actually use. I see no evidence that this graph theoretic problem, although it was motivated by various real world problems, is actually a computational problem that people try to solve in the real world. In fact, I'm pretty sure viral marketers would simply target products at people with lots of facebook friends who pass some kind of "not fake" test.