Is the Tipping Point Toast?

Here's my takeaway from this piece:<p>"Why didn't the Influentials wield more power? With 40 times the reach of a normal person, why couldn't they kick-start a trend every time? Watts believes this is because a trend's success depends not on the person who starts it, but on how susceptible the society is overall to the trend--not how persuasive the early adopter is, but whether everyone else is easily persuaded. And in fact, when Watts tweaked his model to increase everyone's odds of being infected, the number of trends skyrocketed."<p>This sure seems to back up Adreessen's argument that market opportunity is the single most important factor in considering an opportunity.

I tend to agree with the straw man accusation leveled against Watts. His research seems to be an extension of theories of influence, not so much contradictory. But if he didn't pitch it as a war, he wouldn't get media coverage such as this article itself.<p>Watts' main problem is that the Influence lobby sees <i>one</i> type of influential people when there are <i>degrees</i> of influential people. Complete farce: the Influence lobby itself is not one big bubble; it has lots of different theories, many of which talk about <i>degrees</i> and <i>levels</i> of social influence.

So, whether a trend <i>starts</i> depends more on the environment ("tinder-dry forest") than on the starter ("careless smoker"); but you get a much <i>bigger</i> trend if you start with an Influencer.<p>So you get more bang-per-buck from Influencers, right?<p>Seems like a conflict of intentions: science (wanting to understand the big picture) vs. engineering (wanting to make something happen, efficiently).

Watts isn't just some random researcher. His papers are required reading in networks courses. Of course, he's an academic, and academics are boring so fastcompany had to bulldoze some of the hemming and hawing. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watts_and_Strogatz_model" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watts_and_Strogatz_model</a>

The problem I have with all of Gladwell's works (Blink, Tipping Point, etc.) is that his theories are overly simplistic. They are formulated at the cocktail party level, they make interesting stories but they are not sufficiently well thought out or detailed to actually make testable predictions or be useful in any practical sense. This is a shame because some of the things he studies (especially in Blink) is potentially very important and well done research could have wide ranging positive influence.<p>Ultimately though Gladwell proves himself as not a scientist, and seemingly content to just write interesting stories rather than to do the less glamorous work of fleshing out his ideas into something of practical value.

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