Stanford Professor and Sociologist Mark Granovetter recently visited the Yahoo Labs campus to give a talk entitled “The Strength of Weak Ties: Social Networking Meets 21st Century Revolutions.” Granovetter’s observation is that our weaker social ties are most likely to provide us with access to information that we don’t already have, such as job leads. We are already familiar with the ideas and knowledge of our strong ties, as opposed to weak ties that are more likely to be a source of novel information because they move in different circles. According to Granovetter, people have been researching social networks since the 1940’s. He cited Sociologist Stanley Milgram’s small world experiments that used the chain letter technique to observe the average path length for social networks of people in the U.S. Granovetter also discussed another relevant study by Mathematical Psychologist Anatol Rapoport where 851 students at Ann Arbor Junior College were asked to list their eight best friends in order of preference. Then, taking a number of random samples from the group, they traced out and averaged over all samples the total number of people reached by following the network of first and second choices. The study showed that the smallest total number of people were reached through the networks generated by first and second choices (the strongest ties) and the largest number through the seventh and eighth choices, supporting the assertion that more people can be reached through weak ties. With the advent of the Internet, online communities, and social networking sites, the significance of social networks has only increased and made an impact on political movements. While revolutions existed long before Facbook and Twitter, political movements are clearly social phenomena and therefore governed by the laws of social networks and accelerated by social media. This was evident in the Egyptian Revolution, or the “Facebook Revolution.” Facebook enabled users to foster weak ties and diffuse information to engage more users. In Granovetter’s view, in a social network, individuals with only a few weak links are at a disadvantage because they are disconnected with the other parts of the network. Within a social network, weak ties are more powerful than strong ties because information is far more likely to be “diffused” through weaker ties. Watch the entire talk here: