Check the sustainability of friendship

Want to know if your friends network will last long or break? Researchers have found a key to the sustainability of relationships.

Researchers in the US and Hungary have explored the interaction in an online community and mobile phone conversations. Finally they found an algorithm to explain to all.

Professor Tamas Vicsek at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest and his colleagues searched through two datasets to discover how people linked. One of them is the network of more than 30,000 researchers connected to a database of Cornell University, New York, USA. Another data set is a record of the conversations of 4 million mobile phone users within a year.

When put together, these numbers give a new picture of the movement of relationships. The group found small groups that only maintained when there was a group of key members that remained unchanged.

In large groups, the opposite happens. A large community will disintegrate quickly if it does not move, but will last long if it is open to new members. Over time, almost every member changed. An example of this loose, successful alliance is school or company.

In a few years, most members or employees have changed, but that organization has always been known as a separate entity at any time during its existence.

The researchers also developed a formula based on the communication of team members to guess whether an individual would stay or leave the group. Those who express a clear interest in another group will be more likely to leave the group, and the more members contact the current group, the greater the likelihood of loyalty.

MT