Malcom Gladwell wrote a book called The Tipping Point which is based around the idea that social phenomena do not occur gradually, but "tip" over at a certain point ... the broader interpretation of this is: "small groups can achieve big things!" (assuming you have the right group of people.

This discussion came up in yesterday's demo of Tabulas. Everyone (including myself) was quite interested in how the community grew - from which people did Tabulas grow from?

I've always maintained that Daynah, Lauryn, and dodozhang21 were the initial "tipping point" for Tabulas that led to a huge surge of users. For the most part, this is true... but there was a dark horse for the #1 spot! Someone I've NEVER known about! Quite interesting...

Tabulas has been storing referer data since user #800 (actually the loss of the early adopters really hurts me!), so I decided to take a break from work yesterday night and generate a quick and dirty analyzation of the data.

This report will not hold up to any real test of statistical integrity; this is more of a broad stroke more than anything.

The data was currently mapped user (Abe) -> referer (Ben) (referer being the person who referred user to Tabulas; in this case, Ben referred Abe). Now, if Abe then went and referred Caleb to the site, Ben would be accredited for TWO referrals. He referred Abe, and Abe referred Caleb.

And so on and so on.

Click to view the data.

The data is quite interesting. The most interesting part? The top 100 users [0.17%] referred a 3903 out of 19600 possible referrals [19.91%]). 0.17% referred 19.91%!