Reed's Law

Reed's law is the assertion of David P. Reed that the utility of large networks, particularly social networks, can scale exponentially with the size of the network.

Description

See the entry on Group Forming Networks for explanations of Reed's Law.

It is also explained in the Wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reed's_law

Critique

"There are common-sense arguments that suggest Metcalfe's and Reed's laws are incorrect. For example, Reed's Law says that every new person on a network doubles its value. Adding 10 people, by this reasoning, increases its value a thousandfold (210). But that does not even remotely fit our general expectations of network values—a network with 50 010 people can't possibly be worth a thousand times as much as a network with 50 000 people.

At some point, adding one person would theoretically increase the network value by an amount equal to the whole world economy, and adding a few more people would make us all immeasurably rich. Clearly, this hasn't happened and is not likely to happen. So Reed's Law cannot be correct, even though its core insight—that there is value in group formation—is true. And, to be fair, just as Metcalfe was aware of the limitations of his law, so was Reed of his law's." (http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/jul06/4109/3)

More Information

See the entry on Metcalfe's Law and on Moore's Law