October 7th, 2008
The Three Laws of Networked Technologies
Welcome to Gauravonomics Blog! Subscribe to my combined feed in a feed reader or by e-mail and you'll never miss a single post. Thanks for visiting!
(Cross-posted on my fellowship blog - How International Values Shape Communications Technologies)
While reading through chapter 2 of Howard Rheingold’s ‘Smart Mobs’, I started thinking about how the three laws of networked technologies (Sarnoff’s Law, Metcalfe’s Law and Reed’s Law) relate to social media in BRIC countries –
1. Sarnoff’s Law: The value of a broadcast network is proportional to the number of viewers (n).
2. Metcalfe’s Law: The value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of users of the system (n2).
3. Reed’s Law: The value of a group forming network (or a social network) increases exponentially, proportional to 2 raised to the power the number of users in the network (2n).
In Sarnaff’s network, the only communication possible is one-to-many. In Metcalfe’s network, the only communication possible is one-to-one. In Reed’s network, all types of communication are possible, including one-to-one, many-to-many and some-to-some, so it’s effectively any-to-any.
The value of a network with 100 users would be 100 under Sarnoff’s Law, 4950 under Metcalfe’s Law and 1,267,650,600,228,230,000,000,000,000,000 under Reed’s Law! It’s useful to remember that all three of them are only talking about the possible number of connections between the users in a network and, therefore, the potential value of a network. The real value of a network is contingent upon both the actual number of connections between the users in the network and the quality of these connections.
My first thought is that all the three laws are valid for different social media use cases. Let me explain this in the context of Twitter and Facebook.
If you were to use Twitter exclusively for broadcasting your feed, the value of Twitter to you would be equal to the number of users who follow your tweets (Sarnaff’s Law). This, in fact, is true for any feed, including blog feeds.
If Twitter was to be used exclusively to send and receive direct messages, the value of Twitter would have been equal to the square of the number of users on Twitter (Metcalfe’s Law). This, by the way, is a SMS-on-the-web use case of Twitter.
If Twitter was to allow users to form sub-groups, the value of twitter would increase exponentially (Reed’s Law). We have already seen the popularity of sub-groups in other social networks like Friendfeed and Plurk and Twitter might be missing a significant opportunity here.
Facebook, by the way, allows all three use cases — one-to-many broadcasting via pages (Sarnaff’s Law), one-to-one communication via direct messages (Metcalfe’s Law) and any-to-any communication via groups (Reed’s Law).
My second thought is that there are many layers of communication possible between the one-to-one scenario described in Metcalfe’s Law and any-to-any scenario described in Reed’s Law. For instance, the ability to subscribe to other users’ feeds, use @ replies and hash (#) tags, and access the public timeline allows us to mimic a part, but not all, of the group behavior Reed’s Law talks about. It will be useful to quantify the value of each of these layers. I’m sure some very smart people have already tried to answer these questions, and I’ll be back with more once I have done more research.
My third thought is that, if the value of a “social” network is indeed exponentially higher than the value of a telecommunication or a broadcast network, there is significant leapfrogging potential available to BRIC countries. A social network (like MobiChange) that mimics the any-to-any nature of Reed’s network on SMS can create tremendous value in the BRIC countries. However, the more I read about leapfrogging the digital divide, the more convinced I am that leapfrogging is much easier in theory than in practice.
Do stay tuned for follow-up posts that explore all these three thoughts in detail.
