Talk:Flash Crowd

What's the name of the story?

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Did Niven actually title one of his stories "Flash Crowd"?

His collection titled A Hole In Space (copyright 1974) contains two stories on this topic, but neither is titled "Flash Crowd" in the collection. They are:

1. "The Alibi Machine", published in Vertex, 1973.

2. "The Last Days of the Permanently Floating Riot Club".

"Flash Crowd" (1973) was collected in The Flight of the Horse, according to the bibliography in the back of Tales of Known Space. --rbrwr

I read about this instantaneous teleportation booths first in Ringworld from 1970 but it was not used for flash mobs. Just mentioned huge shifts in society behaviour. --Mononoke 08:59, 16 Apr 2005 (UTC)

People keep adding content to the flash mob and flash crowd entries stating that the concept of "flash crowds" created by Larry Niven is equivalent to the concept of "flash mobs."

These concepts are very different: news events draw people to flash crowds, messages passed around for the sole sake of starting flash mobs draw people to flash mobs. Flash crowds are enabled and encouraged by teleportation, this is obviously not the case with flash mobs. Flash crowds are spontaneous and aren't sparked by an organizer; flash mobs (or at least, their initiation) are planned ahead. The "flash" in flash mobs indicates quick gathering, short duration, quick dispersal; the "flash" in flash crowds indicates instantaneous speed of travel to a place. Flash crowds in the story lasted a long time, flash mobs by definition are very short, usually less than 20 minutes long.— Preceding unsigned comment added by Cheesebikini (talk • contribs)

Yes, both terms contain the word "flash" and both involve groups of people, but they're very different concepts and claims that they're equivalent are factual errors.— Preceding unsigned comment added by Cheesebikini (talk • contribs)

If someone can provide a notable third party document, study, or analytical comparison that links flash mobs to flash crowds, then please do so, otherwise it should be dismissed as original research. Frankly they have very little in common aside from the fact that people assemble rapidly -- but then again, so do lots of other words share that similarity: stampede, swarm, etc. etc. Mkdw^talk 07:25, 25 June 2012 (UTC)Reply

[1] looks solid. --joe decker^talk 17:42, 19 July 2016 (UTC)Reply

• Ismail Ari, Bo Hong, Ethan L. Miller, Scott A. Brandt, Darrell and D. E. Long, Managing Flash Crowds on the Internet
• FCAN: Flash Crowds Alleviation Network Using Adaptive P2P Overlay of Cash Proxies IEEE April 2006.

 kgrr ^talk 22:48, 10 March 2010 (UTC)Reply

I am voting for moving the web-/network-phenomenon to the page Flash crowd --Keilandreas (talk) 08:59, 19 October 2010 (UTC)Reply