On spreading recommendations via social gossip

This paper introduces and analyzes a variant of distributed gossip which is motivated by the sharing of recommendations in a social network. The social settings bear two implications on gossip. First, rumors fade after a few hops, and so does our gossip mechanism. Second, users require a rumor to be substantiated by multiple, independent sources in order to adopt it. Consequently, in our social gossip a message is adopted only when it is received over a threshold of independent paths. Social gossip is a new, highly relevant and practically motivated variant of distributed gossip, whose analysis contributes to the fundamental theory of distributed algorithms.