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.