The Strength of Weak Ties
Mark Granovetter · 1973
"Granovetter showed that infrequent, bridging acquaintances — weak ties — matter more for new information and job finds than close friends, because close friends overlap in what they already know."
Granovetter's 1973 insight flipped intuition: your close friends are not your best source of new opportunities — your acquaintances are.
Strong ties cluster — your close friends know each other and share the same information pool. Weak ties bridge clusters; they are the only edges that carry genuinely novel information across otherwise disconnected groups. In a 1973 job-search study, most people found jobs through acquaintances they saw occasionally, not through close confidants. Design implication: optimize for bridges, not just bond strength.
Why do weak ties disproportionately deliver novel information and job leads?
Read more about the topic
The explanation above is written with AI assistance. These are the originals — go to them to check it.
- The Strength of Weak Ties (1973)Mark Granovetter / Wikipedia
Power Laws & Scale-Free Networks
"Barabási showed many real networks — the web, actor collaborations, protein interactions — are scale-free: a few hubs have vastly more links than average, following a power law produced by preferential attachment, not by bell-curve randomness."