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I read all
the claims about the rapid growth of google+ ‘use’ and I still feel unmoved.
Perhaps it’s
for the reason that I put ‘use’ in quote marks: Google + feels very much in its
nascent, gave it a try, walked off, may-be-back-if-enough-other-folk-find-it-interesting-to-remind-me-about-it-later, phase.
Which, to be
fair, is how I started with Twitter. But also with a hundred other new kids on
the block.
But perhaps my reticence is also because of a remarkable scaling effect which happens in
communities. I say communities, it looks to me like this has only been applied
to cities thus far, so bear with me...
I came
across an interesting article by Marcus Du Sautoy at the weekend. This is the
chap who has written and is presenting the current BBC series The Code (http://www.bbc.co.uk/tv/features/code/)
– which looks at the mathematics which
appear to govern, well pretty much everything.
Du Sautoy cites the work of British-born theoretical
physicist Geoffrey West who used maths to discover fundamental laws governing
cities.
“...it can be understood by a single magic number: 1.15. Each time the population of a city increases by 100 per cent (in other words doubles) the social and economic factors scale up by 115 per cent.“So, if you compare a city with a population of one million people to a city of two million, then instead of the larger city having twice as many restaurants, concert halls, libraries and schools, you find instead an extra 15 per cent on top of what you’d expect. Even salaries are affected by this curious ratio...”
In other
words the value of being part of a community (my derivation) grows by an extra
15% each time that community doubles in size.
And while
Google+ has reached its first 10m users in a spectacularly fast period of time
(16 days compared with Twitter’s 780 and Facebook’s 852) its value to the
members of that community is similarly spectacularly limited by its relative
lack of scale.
Let’s try
the maths (not my strongest point so feel free to point out flaws and correct
me:
Based on
Facebook having 640m users and Twitter having 175m (Wikipedia August 1, 2011). Then
the social/economic advantage conferred over Google + users is: approximately
200% greater for Twitter users and 230% greater for Facebook users.
Simply –
Facebook and Twitter ought to prove at least twice as valuable to current users
thanks to the scaling up of value delivered by the sheer size of community.
Growth rate
has no impact on that.
So until we
have a Google + with at least 100m users (and likely twice that) there’s little
chance of it delivery the user experience either Twitter or Facebook can.
The dodgy
maths bit:
How did I
get to this? I took 10m as the base value (Google + users after 16 days). I
doubled this, then doubled the outcome and doubled that (etc) until I reach the
scale of Twitter and then Facebook (an approximate in the case of Twitter).
Taking ‘1’
as my base value for ‘social-economic factors’ generated, I multiplied by our
magic number (1.15), for every time the base community doubled in size.
eg 10m users
x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 = 640m (= Facebook).
Therefore
social-economic factors multiply thus: 1 x 1.15 x 1.15 x 1.15 x 1.15 x1.15 x
1.15 = 2.3 (therefore a growth of 230% compared with original 10m strong
community).
Finally blogged my response to this post - it's an interesting concept, but I think it has to be applied with care, as it seems to apply in specific cases, such as for the owners of a social network and judging the overall value, but not for the experience of individuals.
ReplyDeleteI have responded to Dan on his blog.
ReplyDeleteEssentially Dan thinks the magic number underplays the individual perspective.
I'm not sure that's true.
Here's why: Your (personal and individual) opportunity to join in the formomg a subgroup you value increases by 15 per cent each time the group doubles in size (beyond that which we should expect, according to the 1.15 rule).
And this applies no matter where you are with the group as a whole.
Further, the value you create within the subgroup may extend beyond the subgroup - providing civic value to the group as a whole.
Indeed Reed's Law would have it that each extra addition to the group doubles the number of subgroups which can form.
Which suggests our magic 1.15 ratio seriously underplays the scale advantage of social networks both for the individual and at a civic level.
It's an interesting debate, and there's probably no right or wrong answer, as I suspect some of it depends on the nature of the community itself.
ReplyDeleteFor example, in a general social network, I'd agree that the opportunities to form subgroups I care about would increase, and therefore I'd be able to benefit from potentially more value, depending on how many of those subgroups I can actually make use of at any time.
But in a more focused community, the ability to join and form subgroups is somewhat negated by the fact that the overall community loses focus and cohesion, particular in achieving common aims, and also the costs of organising that community becomes much greater.
Did you mean in a 'less' focused community in the last para?
ReplyDeleteIn any event I think it is way less about the 'focus' of a silo (since that is always externally selected) and much more about the ability to surface shared real time purpose within the largest possible group.
There is certainly an argument to say a community which fails to enable the easy formation of groups of purpose won't win, no matter how big it gets. Similar distraction will occur from poor filtering.
But all things being equal, bigger is going to give you more opportunities to focus on the thing that matters to you with more people who can help you create value about it - more often for more people. Has to win.