Comments on: Metcalfe’s Law: more misunderstood than wrong?

By: http://zanacom.com/index.php

http://zanacom.com/index.php — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 23:11:01 +0000

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By: How To “Go Viral”: Achieving Critical Mass In Social Media | Elements In Time

Mon, 20 Jun 2011 05:46:21 +0000

[...] there is some argument that users do not equal Metcalfe’s original description of “compatibly communicating [...]

By: Living up to Metcalf’s law on social innovation communities | Spigit

Living up to Metcalf’s law on social innovation communities | Spigit — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 20:15:05 +0000

[...] of a network of compatibly communicating machines grows quadratically (not linearly). I found this post that shows a reproduction of his original slide. The basis for this assertion is the fact that in a [...]

By: Big Potatoes | 2. Beyond the post-war legacy

Big Potatoes | 2. Beyond the post-war legacy — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 10:44:48 +0000

[...] [3] Compound interest, like parts of biology and physics, works exponentially; but IT rarely moves as xt, where x is a constant number bigger than 1, and t, the exponent, represents time elapsed. While Moore’s ‘law’ shows few signs of reaching its limits, in the rest of IT growth tends to be sub-exponential or polynomial. Still more restrictively, around 1980, Metcalfe’s law suggested only that the dollar value of a network proceeds as the square of the number of ‘compatibly communicating devices’. For a discussion, see Simeon Simeonov, ‘Metcalfe’s Law: more misunderstood than wrong?’, 26 July 2006, on http://blog.simeonov.com/2006/07/26/metcalfes-law-more-misunderstood-than-wrong/ [...]

By: How to Achieve Critical Mass in Social Media | THE LAB

How to Achieve Critical Mass in Social Media | THE LAB — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 18:35:53 +0000

[...] there is some argument that users do not equal Metcalfe’s original description of “compatibly communicating [...]

By: Metcalfe’s Law Revisited, Or Take a Node to Lunch Day « Egghead Marketing

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 16:05:46 +0000

[...] been a bit written on Metcalfe’s Law in a Web 2.0 world here and here. If you want to get mathy, follow those links. But here’s my [...]

By: Mi otro blog… » Blog Archive » El valor de las redes: La ley de Metcalfe

Wed, 10 Dec 2008 19:58:02 +0000

[...] Bob Metcalfe, que además relaciona su ley y la de Moore con el famoso efecto Long Tail, o la de HighContrast, en la que se explica que el problema no es que sea incorrecta, sino que se ha entendido mal [...]

By: Nodalities » Blog Archive » This Week’s Semantic Web

Nodalities » Blog Archive » This Week’s Semantic Web — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 17:52:28 +0000

[...] Metcalfe’s Law: more misunderstood than wrong? [...]

By: Metcalfe’s law « Libitt’s Weblog

Metcalfe’s law « Libitt’s Weblog — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 11:19:05 +0000

[...] Metcalfe’s Law: More Misunderstood Than Wrong?. A co-worker of Bob Metcalfe puts the IEEE Spectrum critique in perspective. Republished in Web 2.0 Journal here. [...]

By: Stan

Stan — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 16:55:30 +0000

It seems to me it’s alot simpler than that.

The value of a network is equal to the number of links in the network. For a *fully connected* network, where every node has a direct connection to every other node, that number matches melcalfe’s law i.e. o(n squared).

But for e.g. social networks, the number of links is really more o(n). This is because the number of other user’s that the average user is directly connected to is not a function of the overall size of the network.

If there are a 100,000 users in a network, and the average number of connections is 10 (say), then the value of the network is (1000 * 10 ) /2 = 500,000 – and not 10,000,000,000.