And here I was worried from the headline that I might have to call out Uncle Paul.

"While there has been much work examining the affects of social network structure on innovation adoption, models to date have lacked important features such as meta-populations reflecting real geography or influence from mass media forces. In this article, we show these are features crucial to producing more accurate predictions of a social contagion and technology adoption at the city level. Using data from the adoption of the popular micro-blogging platform, Twitter, we present a model of adoption on a network that places friendships in real geographic space and exposes individuals to mass media influence. We show that homopholy both amongst individuals with similar propensities to adopt a technology and geographic location are critical to reproduce features of real spatiotemporal adoption. Furthermore, we estimate that mass media was responsible for increasing Twitter's user base two to four fold. To reflect this strength, we extend traditional contagion models to include an endogenous mass media agent that responds to those adopting an innovation as well as influencing agents to adopt themselves."

"...Twitter's distinction between different types o interactions allows us to establish a parallelism between online and offline social networks: personal interactions are more likely to occur on internal links of groups (the weakness of strong ties), events transmitting information pass preferentially through links connecting different groups or even more through users acting as bridges between groups (the strength of weak ties)."