Metcalfe's law: Difference between revisions

Within the context of social networks, many, including Metcalfe himself, have proposed modified models in which the value of the network grows as ''n'' log ''n'' rather than ''n''².<ref>{{cite web |url=http://vcmike.wordpress.com/2006/08/18/metcalfe-social-networks/ |title=Guest Blogger Bob Metcalfe: Metcalfe's Law Recurses Down the Long Tail of Social Networks |date=18 August 2006 |access-date=2010-06-20}}</ref><ref>B. Briscoe, A. Odlyzko, and B. Tilly, Metcalfe’s law is wrong, ''IEEE Spectrum'' '''43''':7 (2006), pp. 34–39.</ref> Reed and Odlyzko have sought out possible relationships to Metcalfe's Law in terms of describing the relationship of a network and one can read about how those are related. Tongia and Wilson also examine the related question of the costs to those excluded.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://ijoc.org/ojs/index.php/ijoc/article/view/873/549 |title=The Flip Side of Metcalfe's Law: Multiple and Growing Costs of Network Exclusion | author = Rahul Tongia and Ernest Wilson| date= September 2007 |access-date=2013-01-15}}</ref>

 

Despite many arguments about Metcalfe' law, no real data based evidence for or against was available for more than 30 years. Only in July 2013, Dutch researchers managed to analyze European Internet usage patterns over a long enough time and found ''n''² proportionality for small values of ''n'' and (''n'' log ''n'') proportionality for large values of ''n''.<ref>{{Citation|doi=10.1016/j.infoecopol.2013.07.002|title=Empirical validation of Metcalfe’s law: How Internet usage patterns have changed over time|first1=António|last1=Madureira|first2=Frank|last2=den Hartog|first3=Harry|last3=Bouwman|author-link3=Harry Bouwman| first4=Nico|last4=Baken|journal=Information Economics and Policy|year=2013}}</ref> A few months later, Metcalfe himself provided further proof, as he used Facebook's data over the past 10 years to show a good fit for Metcalfe's law (the model is ''n²'' ).<ref>{{Cite journal|title = Metcalfe's law after 40 years of Ethernet|last = Metcalfe|first = Bob|date = 2013|journal = IEEE Computer|volume = 46|issue = 12|pages = 26–31|doi = 10.1109/MC.2013.374}}</ref>

 

 

 

== See also ==