The Jason Salas Experience

As we've been collaborating on a Web 3.0 social media platform for the last several weeks, in the typical intense back-and-forth that we've been engaging in since the 2nd grade Will and I discussed whether multiplatform accessibility in modern-day social networking applications is an extension of the precepts of Metcalfe's Law, or merely inherent as a part of it. Does the value of a networked system gain any more natural utility as the number of nodes remains the same but the access points for each is increased? We investigated.

Here's our revisions to the theory, using Metcalfe's original facsimile analogy: if two people both have fax machines, their combined value (the possible number of peering combinations) would be 1 (e.g., n(n-1)/2). Every person owning a fax machine from that point on would increase the overall value of the network by virtue of the expanded peering. This is a well-proven rule in distributed computing, both for mainframe and client/server envirnonments. But we find it to be one that's candidate for revision with the continuing rise of the Social Web.

So does the value truly lie in the network itself? In social networking apps, like Twitter, the nodes are the people themselves, not the access points they use. The actors in a given social network could remain constant, but if each was given a mobile phone, a console gaming system, an Internet appliance, an interactive TV portal, an embedded widget, a Firefox extension/browser plugin and additional means of posting status message updates - in addition to the base web access - would they change the utility of the system?

I argued that the network's aggregate value would remain unchanged for the network itself, seeing as how the other nodes wouldn't necessarily care how their peers connected to it; even if the user personally gained more out of the experience. Ever the alpha to my omega, Will countered by saying that the overall value of the network surely would increase in parallel with each node having n more access points, as each member of a user's social circle would be able to enjoy their expanded interaction, given a more convinient ability to access it. This, he defended, would add to the total worth of the network, albeit requiring an additional multiplier to properly quantify each user's additional affinity.

Perhaps we've stumbled upon an extension to Metcalfe all our own. Consider from now on Salas's Law with the Ymesei Coefficient. (You're welcome, world.)

Obviously, it's been a slow day at the office for both of us.  I wonder if Sergey and Larry started out this way...