A Snap occurs when two things connect.
It is the moment at which separate pieces of information become joined.
Sometimes the Snap is obvious.
John Lennon → The Beatles
Sometimes it is surprising.
Two people may share a birthday.
A film title may contain the name of a city associated with another subject.
A number may simultaneously be a bus route, a flight number and a historical year.
The Snap is the point of contact.
Existing snaps
Some snaps already exist independently of us.
London is the capital of the United Kingdom.
Paul McCartney was a Beatle.
The Moon orbits Earth.
These are existing relationships.
Linkology can identify and follow them.
Made snaps
Other snaps are created by bringing two existing facts together.
Suppose two unrelated people were born on the same date.
Neither birth caused the other.
Nevertheless, the shared date creates a legitimate connection.
The facts are real.
The link is curated.
This is central to Linkology.
Making a connection is not the same as inventing a fact.
We are identifying a common coordinate and snapping the two subjects together through it.
Strong and weak snaps
Not all snaps are equally strong.
A connection may be technically correct but uninteresting.
Two famous people may have both visited London.
That is a real link, but London is so widely visited that the connection may have little significance.
By contrast, two people having stayed in the same small hotel on the same date would be much more specific.
The strength of a Snap can depend on:
specificity
rarity
relevance
surprise
explanatory value
A strong Snap often combines several of these.
Multiple snaps
The most satisfying links often involve more than one Snap.
Consider Shea Stadium.
The Beatles played there in 1965.
Billy Joel played the stadium’s final concerts in 2008.
Paul McCartney joined Billy Joel during the encore.
Beatles songs were performed.
The venue was subsequently demolished.
This is not one connection.
It is a cluster of reinforcing connections involving Character, Geography, Objects and Seconds.
Several snaps occur at once.
That produces a stronger network than a single coincidence.
Snap and ambiguity
A Snap can also occur when the same symbol, word or abbreviation belongs to different systems.
Take:
AA
In one context it may mean the Automobile Association.
In another it may mean American Airlines.
In another it can refer to a battery size.
In lowercase, aa is also a word for a type of rough lava.
The letters have not changed.
The context has.
This produces a Snap between otherwise unrelated systems.
Numbers behave similarly.
A number might simultaneously be:
a year,
a bus route,
a motorway,
a flight number,
a room number,
a sports shirt number,
or a position in a ranking.
Linkology can exploit these overlaps.
The Snap exists because two systems happen to use the same label.