Kossinets, G., Kleinberg, J., & Watts, D. (2008). The structure of information pathways in a social communication network. In 14th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining (pp. 435–443).
I do not know enough about what you hope to use the concept for. From the abstract of Kossinets et al, I see one thing missing that I would include: A different temporal dimension. In my work with risk networks in communities, I sometimes think of the long-term relationships as providing a basic spinal structure, with the relatively short term and even episodic “froth” as other aspects of it. “Sam Friedman”