Losing Metcalfe
It always makes me smile when people challenge theories that are seen as the foundation of a new economy.
Noah Brier recently challenged the theory of Metcalfe’s law, one of the web 2.0 founding theories. Which basically is that the more people that are on a network, the greater value the network has, which only attracts more people to the network.
However as he concludes more people doesn’t only attract more people but also more noise, in the shape of spam, such as vampires on Facebook or followers on Twitter. Objects that detracts value from the network rather than adding to it.
You have to find a way to spare the group from scale. Scale alone kills conversations, because conversations require dense two-way conversations. In conversational contexts, Metcalfe’s law is a drag. The fact that the amount of two-way connections you have to support goes up with the square of the users means that the density of conversation falls off very fast as the system scales even a little bit. You have to have some way to let users hang onto the less is more pattern, in order to keep associated with one another.
As the value of having conversations through social networks increases as do the importance of your contacts. Initially people loved to have 10 000 MySpace friends but many, when switching to Facebook/other networks, instead chose a closed network and not accepting all friend requests, but only those contacts they wanted to have a conversation with.
Vimeo is a great example where they focus on only you and your friends, where you share your personal videos and not the YouTube blooper videos. It’s not built so that you can find any other video on there, instead it’s you and your contacts that are in the centre.
The value of a social network is defined not only by who’s on it, but by who’s excluded.
I’m waiting for something that says: “Hi, here you can have a maximum of 25 contacts. Chose them well”
(Photo by Danceinthesky under a Creative common license)
Bloggar.se: facebook, youtube, sociala nätverk, vimeo, metcalfe’s law
