Recently by Timothy J. Carroll
Is Facebook becoming too popular? Do social networks have a tipping point? ReadWriteWeb calls it the reverse network effect. To understand the network effect, think about the fax machine. The first fax machine was worthless. Absolutely worthless, because it couldn't send the fax to anyone else; no one else had a fax machine. The more people that purchased fax machines, the more value each machine had, i.e. the bigger the network, the better the network.
A reverse happens when the scale of the network drives away users. Is Facebook too popular? Maybe. Skype, they say, will be one of the only networks immune to it.
Skype gets more useful with each new user, and each new user promotes Skype, consciously or unconsciously, for his or her own reasons. Even better, the cost of providing the service goes down with each new user, and that is really unusual (a function of Skype's P2P architecture). Google and PayPal also benefit from each new user, but they still have to service that user, and that costs money. In the case of a video service such as YouTube, the servicing cost is significant. So Skype really is in a league of its own when it comes to network effects, and that is why it may become the world's largest telephone company and the biggest economic success story of the Web 2.0 era. (Google Voice, having just thrown its hat in the ring to battle Skype, will be interesting to watch. My bet is on Skype.)
MySpace topped out and, once Facebook came along, it was relegated to second-class status. Well maybe that's overstating it - it still serves it's original purpose for bands and such.
But now Twitter is coming up in Facebook's rear view mirror. What next?
My Facebook crave never reached even modest levels, but I have a page. I reached a tipping point recently when some undesirable outcomes and unforeseen visitors started to ruin my experience. I think that's when the reverse started for me. I immediately cut to 20 friends and hid myself. Why 20? Why not? I had to draw the line somewhere. This even led to an embarrassing conversation where I told a friend that he made the cut, only to realize soon after that he did not. Marc, I swear you were number 21 (just missed)!
I know we posted some of these before, but my brother sent them along again. And they don't stop being funny: songs, graphed.
NY Times columnist Paul Krugman lays out the right plan for solving two immense problems at once:
1. Economic depression
2. Environmental ruination
Let's today step out of the normal boundaries of analysis of our economic crisis and ask a radical question: What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it's telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall -- when Mother Nature and the market both said: "No more."
He says - surprise, surprise - that Americans need to "greenify" (my word) the marketplace. Or else.
"Just as a few lonely economists warned us we were living beyond our financial means and overdrawing our financial assets, scientists are warning us that we're living beyond our ecological means and overdrawing our natural assets," argues Glenn Prickett, senior vice president at Conservation International. But, he cautioned, as environmentalists have pointed out: "Mother Nature doesn't do bailouts."
A neat New Yorker profile on Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.
Aside from the clean-freak riff, the gist is this: He is the pugnacious gatekeeper that an "open door policy" president needs.
That is clear, and the fact that he is currently being politically neutered to fit the (at least superficially) apolitical office he holds.
Not easy, no doubt, neutering the man who has been known to send Godfather-like political messages:
More than any other story about Emanuel's tactics--and there are lots of them--the tale of the "dead-fish race" came to define his public persona as a Democratic operative. He and Axelrod were working for David Swarts, a Democratic official from Erie County, New York, running an underfunded campaign for a congressional seat long held by Republicans. "We were rolling the dice on the race, just spending the money we had as it came in to try and get these numbers up," Axelrod said. Their plan was to take a poll at the end of the contest which they hoped would show a competitive race and then use the results to help raise last-minute funds and overtake their opponent.
"The poll came back a week or two before the end, and it said we were down by seventeen," Axelrod said. "And that was it." According to Axelrod, Swarts's campaign manager later studied the poll's findings and concluded that the pollster had botched the analysis: the survey showed that Swarts was just five or six points behind. (The pollster says that the error was actually minor and quickly caught.) Axelrod added, "Had we gotten that correct poll then, we would have put our foot to the pedal. But it was too late. So Rahm, being as invested as he was in the thing, expressed himself as only Rahm can." After the election, Emanuel and his colleagues hired a Massachusetts company called Enough Is Enough, which specialized in "creative revenge," to send the pollster a box with a dead fish inside. Emanuel laughed mischievously when I asked him about the prank. "We had our choice of animals," he said.
