Posts Tagged “Metcalfe's Law”

NOT a photo of the author.

I recently fell prey to the marketing campaign staged by Classmates.com. You know…the site that purports that they will help you reconnect with all the friends you had in high school.

Balderdash.

It turns out, Classmates.com is (as far as I can tell) a complete waste of time – unless you pony up for the monthly membership charges for their “Gold Membership” package. Now tiered membership levels are nothing new. Lots of social networking sites do something similar. However, other social network sites with dual-level memberships actually give you something of value at the “free membership” level.

Robert Metcalfe (founder of 3Com and inventor of Ethernet) identified what’s come to be known Metcalfe’s Law: The value of a network increases exponentially with the number of users connected to the system. Read the rest of this entry »