来自牛津大学Felix Reed-Tsochas博士领衔的一份调研数据显示APP应用开发者和牧羊人有着诸多的相同点。

Herding instinct

这是一个乍看之下相当不可思议的结论。但是事实上Felix Reed-Tsochas和他的同事向我们展示了他们的调研的独到之处，他们在2007年用超过两个月的时间追踪了facebook内超过1亿次应用的安装行为，覆盖了2700款应用和5000万名facebook用户。

研究者发现一旦一款应用能够达到一天55次安装的临界点，它很可能就会飙升。当一款应用安装超过1000次的时候，病毒式传播就会发挥它的效能。该分析称用户一般有仿效心理，他们更加认同那些看起来比较受其他用户欢迎的应用。Felix Reed-Tsochas表示一款应用的普及和流行主要依赖其他用户的选择，而不是该款游戏本身的性能，当然后者也是成功的关键环节，但是该研究想说的是用户的选择实施上更多影响了其他用户的选择。

牧羊人知道领头羊的重要性，只要这些羊能够按照要求走，其他的羊即使不吆喝也能自动尾随而来。一个应用安装可能也有这样的趋势，热门的会因为网站排行榜的推荐和用户的口碑传播而获得更多的安装，而那些无人问津的应用会因为没有人眷顾而继续沉沦。

也许这就是用户的群体性心理。（本文由游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译）

A new study shows that consumers have a herding instinct to follow the crowd. However, this instinct appears to switch off if the product fails to achieve a certain popularity threshold.

The Oxford University study, published in this week’s PNAS journal, is based on an analysis of how millions of Facebook users adopted software, known as apps, to personalise their Facebook pages.

The researchers analysed anonymised data that tracked 100 million installations of apps adopted by Facebook users over two months in 2007. The data allowed researchers to observe on an hourly basis the rate at which 2,700 apps were installed by 50 million Facebook users. They discovered that once an app had reached a rate of about 55 installations a day, its popularity then soared to reach stellar proportions. A typical app was installed by 1,000 users, but the most popular app ‘Top Friends’ was in a different league, being adopted by almost a fifth (12 million users) of the entire Facebook population.

The study concludes that social influence had a key role in whether apps became flops or hits. Crucially, when the data was monitored in 2007, Facebook friends would always be notified if one of their online friends adopted a new app. All Facebook users could also see a list of the most popular apps – similar to best-seller lists – so knew how the ‘global’ as well as their ‘local’ community of Facebook friends rated the apps.

Dr Felix Reed-Tsochas, a James Martin Lecturer from the Oxford Martin School’s Institute for Science, Innovation and Society at the Saïd Business School, said: ‘Our analysis reveals a very interesting new finding. Users only appear to be influenced by the choices of other users above a certain level of popularity, and at that point popularity drives future popularity. Below this threshold, the effects of social influence are imperceptible. Because popularity seems to depend mainly on the choices of other users in the community, rather than intrinsic characteristics of the applications themselves, it does not appear possible to predict which applications will succeed and which will fail ahead of time.’

The findings could have implications for the online world, for example the book retailers who allow users to rate the products and thereby influence their future popularity. The study may also inform us about our behaviour in the offline world too.

Dr Reed-Tsochas commented: ‘There has been a lot of research into the spread of ideas and products. Previously, we have only been able to track the spread of successful innovations, and then only among a small set of potential users. Our research in the virtual world of online social networks is the equivalent to moving from a fixed telescope that lets us view a restricted number of stars to having a complete map of all the stars in the universe.

‘At this stage, we simply don’t know whether this marks an important difference between offline and online behaviour, or whether more detailed and comprehensive data from offline contexts will identify similar collective behaviour in settings that do not involve online environments.’

The data used by the research team contains no information about individuals, and only information about individual applications, so there are no implications in terms of the privacy of individual Facebook users.（source：ox.ac.uk）