Well, that's how avalanche work in the mountain: you don’t really get any less gobbledegook than pack of snow crushing you or not. In the case of social networ

Well, that's how avalanche work in the mountain: you don’t really get any less gobbledegook than pack of snow crushing you or not. In the case of social networks, the idea is to make sense of how people start adopting a behaviour. For that, you have many models, from ‘susceptibility’: a user adopts if it pleases her, as soon as any of her neighbour adopt it; to avalanches: one can’t tell the benefit without using it, so, as a proxy, they use a number of friends using it as a threshold. There are variants, including where users can stop using it; a more obvious one is using the weight relations; a more significant is considering the structure of the network: can one potential consider that their friends using it might be part of the same group (a ‘facet’ to re-use Field’s vocabulary) and does it encourages me to adopt or no, on the contrary. When you talk to people about adopting trends, they usually explain that “every body is doing it”, but if you dig using several examples, “everybody” ends up being a form or another of those model. It might be ‘influencers’ that may of may not be a stable or identifiable group, too. If you are concerned in targeting ads to the right people, understanding which case work for you is key. This is why Facebook tried (controversial) ads indicating that some of your friends were using the service already. But even without that creepy factor of expressly indicating that, you might want to measure whether you have better conversation rate for people with no friends, one friend, two or three, four to nine, ten to twenty, or more than that already using your service. Cases include situation where those friends might know each other, or be part of clusters or cliques (respectively, groups where everyone knows almost- and everyone else). That would allow you to target your advertising to the specific behaviour of your service. I’ve been studying that for the past ten years (so not exactly when Facebook started, but initially on other networks); since, I’ve made considerable efforts to make a complex and counter-intuitive discipline clear enough for any marketing intern to grasp it; I’m not sure “gobbledegook” is exactly how I want it to be described to me.