Achievement

We investigate the interplay of social network and social influence on the adoption of free, user-created content in the virtual world of Second Life. Using a dataset assembled from a series of snapshots in Second Life, we find that adoption rate increases with the number of adopting friends a user has at any given time, but with diminishing returns. Furthermore, items spread through the social network tend to be niche items, which are not adopted widely. At the individual level, users with many friends tend to be less influenced by any particular friend and thus adopt at lower rates. (Bakshy, Karrer, and Adamic, 2009)