METCALFE’S LAW AND FACEBOOK, JEJU, SOUTH KOREA

Metcalfe’s Law has been rearing its head over the past week, being mentioned in a conversation with a Jeju Life staff member and today while I was reading a Business Week story about The Trouble with Twitter.

The Wikipedia entry on the law provides this example:

The law has often been illustrated using the example of fax machines: a single fax machine is useless, but the value of every fax machine increases with the total number of fax machines in the network, because the total number of people with whom each user may send and receive documents increases.

After reading this story (by none other than Publishing 2.0’s Scott Karp) things got really interesting. The inverse effect of Metcalfe’s Law might be appearing on Facebook:

Right now, Facebook feels like a free-for-all — there’s huge value in so many people I know professionally and personally being on Facebook, but the value is diminished because when I logged in everything is all mashed together. Doc Searls posted about the diminishing returns of Facebook, as he’s been overrun by non-value-creating requests from the network.

Food for Facebook thought.

THE PROMISE IS THE ‘ESSENTIAL’ PIECE, JEJU, SOUTH KOREA

The promise is the essential piece, the thing that convinces a potential user to become an actual user. Everyone already has enough to do, every day, and no matter what you think of those choices (”I would never watch that much TV,” “Why are they at work at 10 p.m.?”), those choices are theirs to make. Any new claim on someone’s time must obviously offer some value, but more important, it must offer some value higher than something else he/she already does, or he/she won’t free up the time.

- Clay Shirky

THE PEOPLE WHO ARE ON FIRE, JEJU, SOUTH KOREA

Having a handful of highly motivated people and a mass of barely motivated ones used to be a recipe for frustration. The people who were on fire wondered why the general population didn’t care more and the general population wondered why those obessesed people just didn’t shut up. Now the highly motivated people can create a context more easily in which barely motivated people can be effective without having to become activists themselves.

- Clay Shirky

TV TECH SHOWS ARE JUST PLAIN BAD, JEJU, SOUTH KOREA

While in Japan, I was able to see some of BBC World and one of their feature shows is a tech program called >Click.

I could only watch and shake my head in disbelief at how dated the format was.

The male presenter was ‘off to the movies’ in LA to cover what the movie industry is currently up to: cleaning old movies using digital techniques and fighting piracy. The presenter jumped around on camera excitedly making bad jokes about Hollywood (Tinseltown and the weather) before getting down to some admittedly interesting reports.

However, back in the London studio a big chested woman reporter in a low cut top guided us through open source software that is GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program).

It’s like the tech shows of the late 1990s and early 2000s: that we needed to help us make sense of all of these new technologies.

But that was eight years ago.

And if it’s on a show like this it’s already old, old news. I’ve known about GIMP for years and they’re only just debuting it on >Click.

You want to be reading TechCrunch, or a personal favourite of mine Techmeme, which aggregates the biggest tech stories from around the web as they happen. Better still, subscribe to CNET’s pod cast of indeterminate length: Buzz Out Loud. From Monday to Friday they provide analysis on the biggest tech headlines.