Technologies of Co-operation
Thanx to Stephen Hemsley for this great piece of insight…
I (Stephen) was doing a little “research” and found this little gem. I am sure this explains why the numbers of 360 are growing as they are. Have a read and you will understand what I mean.
How to use the information it contains?
1. Find a common ground with your people. What matters is their life. Family, occupation, recreation and motivation?
2. Find out if what they are doing now is contributing to what matters to them. Are they happy?
3. Find out if 360 might offer them an avenue to generate extra income that will help them with what matters in THEIR life.
4. We all need money to do the things we want to do. The timing of 360 could be just what is needed to help them make a change for the better in their life.
5. We are a TEAM. Together Everyone Achieves More.
6. Join SuccessTeam360 and use the power of numbers as Reed’s law suggests.
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Excerpted from Smart Mobs – Howard Rheingold – 2002
“In the social sciences, prediction is necessarily fuzzy. In the economics of computer-mediated social networks, however, four key mathematical laws of growth have been derived by four astute inquirers: Sarnoff’s Law, Moore’s Law, Metcalf’s Law and Reed’s Law. Each law is about how value is affected by technological leverage.
Sarnoff’s Law emerged from the advent of radio and television networks in the early twentieth century, in which a central source broadcasts from a small number of transmitting stations to a large number of receivers. Broadcast pioneer David Sarnoff pointed out that the value of broadcast networks is proportionate to the number of viewers.
The often-cited Moore’s Law is the reason the electronic miniaturization has driven the hyper-evolution of electronics, computers, and networks.
In 1965 Gordon Moore, cofounder if Intel and one of the inventers of the microprocessor, noted that the number of elements that could be packed into the same amount of space on a microchip had doubled every eighteen months in the future.
Anything that doubles and redoubles grows large very quickly, from 2,250 elements in Intel’s first processor of 1971 to 42 million elements in the Pentium 4 processor thirty years later.
Computers and electronic components have driven industrial growth for decades because they are among the rare technologies that grow more powerful and less expensive simultaneously. Without the efficiencies discussed by Moore’s Law, the PC, the Internet and mobile telephones would have been impossibly large, unintelligent, and expensive.
What happens when you link devices based on Moore’s Law? When ARPA wizards gathered at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in the early 1970s to create the first personal computers, one of the engineering aces, Bob Metcalf, led the team that invented the Ethernet, a high speed network that interconnected PCs in the same building.
Metcalf left PARC, founded 3Com, Inc., cashed out and came up with Metcalf’s Law, which describes the growth of value in networks. The math is simple and is based on a fundamental mathematical property of networks: the number of potential connections between nodes grows more quickly with the square of the numbers of nodes.
If you have two nodes, each with a value of one unit, the value of joining them is four units. Four interconnected nodes, each still worth one unit, is worth sixteen units when networked, and one hundred nodes is worth one hundred times one hundred, or ten thousand.
When value increases exponentially more quickly than the number of nodes, the mathematical consequences translate into economic leverage connecting two networks creates far more value than the sum of their values as independent networks.
David Reed has a graying beard and a wicked twinkle in his eye. He’s not the type of fellow to pound on the table to make a point. He’s more the kind of fellow who genially proves he is right with equations on a whiteboard.
As we sipped lobster bisque in Kendall square, I asked him what led him to Reed’s Law. ‘I had the first ‘eureka’ when I thought about why eBay was so successful’.
eBay, which has turned out to be the only hugely successful profitable e-commerce business, doesn’t sell any merchandise; it provides a market for customers to buy and sell from each other. eBay won because it facilitated the formation of social groups around specific interests.
Social groups form around people who want to buy or sell teapots or antique radios. At that time I had been reading Fukuyama about social capital. Fukuyama argues in his book Trust that there is a strong co-relation between the prosperity of national economies and social capital, which he defines as the ease with which people in a particular culture can form new associations.
I realized that the millions of humans who used the millions of computers added another important property – the ability of the people to form groups. I remembered that when it became possible to send and reply to entire groups in email, it became possible to create ad hoc discussions.
Since then all sorts of chat rooms, message boards, listservs, buddy lists, auction markets, have added news ways for people to form groups online. Human communication adds a dimension to the computer network. I started thinking in terms of group – forming networks (GFNs).
I saw that the value of a GFN grows even faster-much, much faster than the networks where Metcalf’s Law holds true.
Reed’s Law shows that the value of the network grows proportionately not to the square of the users, but exponentially. That means you raise two to the power of the nodes instead of squaring the number of nodes.
The value of two nodes is four under Metcalf’s law and Reed’s Law, but the value of ten nodes is one hundred (ten to the second power) under Metcalf’s Law and 1024 (two to the tenth power) under Reed’s law – and the differential rates of growth climb the hockey stick curve from there. This explains how social networks, enabled by email and other social communications, drove the growth of the network beyond communities of engineers and to include every kind of interest group.
Reed’s Law is the link between computer networks and social networks.
Reed, using his law to analyze the value of different kinds of networks, believes he has discovered an important cultural and economic shift. When a network is aimed at broadcasting something of value to individuals, like a television network, the value of services is linear. When the network enables transactions between the individual nodes, the value is squared. When the same network includes ways for individuals to form groups the value is exponential.
Reed, using his law to analyze the value of different kinds of networks, believes he has discovered an important cultural and economic shift.
When a network is aimed at broadcasting something of value to individuals, like a television network, the value of services is linear. When the network enables transactions between the individual nodes, the value is squared. When the same network includes ways for individuals to form groups the value is exponential.”
Thank you Mr. Rheingold