What About Reed's Law?

Lot's of discussion in the blog world emanating from Bob Metcalfe's response to the IEEE Spectrum piece suggesting that Metcalfe's law overstates the value that an additional node creates on a network.

I think its great that Bob defended the law named after him and went on to discuss its role in social networks. But I was hoping he'd discuss Reed's Law which states that the value growth of a social network is much greater, instead of n^2 its c2^n. Anything that grows at the power of ^n is a big deal.

To date, the best thinking/writing I've seen on this subject was a post Tom Evslin did last fall.

Given the value creation we've witnessed in the past year with juggernauts like MySpace and YouTube, I wonder of Reed may be right. I am not enough of a math wiz to figure that out. So I'd love to hear what Bob Metcalfe thinks.

Comments

[Scott Rafer]

I had the same reaction: http://featured.gigaom.com/2006/08/17/is-metcalfes-law-really-wrong/#comment-156247

One way of reading Bob Metcalfe's remarks in the interview is that he's adding an additional coefficient to his prior math and effectively co-opting what Reed put forth. Originally and very reasonably, Metcalfe's Law looked only at least-common-denominator Internet connections. It may well be time for him to update it to Metcalfe 2.0.

[Scott Rafer]

I had the same reaction: http://featured.gigaom.com/2006/08/17/is-metcalfes-law-really-wrong/#comment-156247

One way of reading Bob Metcalfe's remarks in the interview is that he's adding an additional coefficient to his prior math and effectively co-opting what Reed put forth. Originally and very reasonably, Metcalfe's Law looked only at least-common-denominator Internet connections. It may well be time for him to update it to Metcalfe 2.0.

[Maria making pictures]

Yes I agree with you, value creation has enormous importance for business.
You named YouTube as an example, which I think is exelent.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts with me !

[John Dodds]

I got a little lost in the maths but it wasn't clear to me that there was any ratchetting down of the value of a social network on the basis that some proportion of the interconnections will be inert.

For example, I set up a MySpace page a long time ago and apparently now have many thousands of friends there, but I have never added to my page and never go there, all those thousands of conenctions to me are for all intents and purposes worthless.