Losing Metcalfe by Jonas

This body has been networked

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.

Clay Shirkley:

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.

Paul Saffo:

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)

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July 7, 2008 / 2 Comments.

2 Comments

  1. Noah Brier replied:

    The limiting your number of friends thing is an interesting concept, but ultimately I’m not sure it would do the trick. After all, if it was your 25 closest friends, wouldn’t you already have sufficient means of communication?

    One thing I’ve been turning around in my head is the ability for some gradation in the type of friend someone is. Kind of like on Twitter where you can follow someone or follow them on your phone. The choices are opaque, but say a lot about how you feel about that person …

    July 8th, 2008 at 6:18 pm. Permalink.

  2. Jonas replied:

    Agreed that the limiting number is not really sufficient. I like Doc Searls comment and will be interesting to follow what they’re doing in the VRM project.

    I’m guessing Facebook is gearing towards this with, for example, the possibility of sorting friends into groups which probably will evolve into something more meaningful.

    July 9th, 2008 at 1:07 pm. Permalink.

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