
An interesting thought posted by Scott Rafer via Tim Oren...
Reed's Law is the next valuation asymptote that we all get to strive for, possibly for the rest of our careers. The data-rich relationships that it requires online communities to build may be twenty years in the future. The current software How can the smart money throw away the lessons of the dotcom bust and Metcalfe's Law so completely? is a tiny step in that direction.
For reference, all via Wikipedia:
- Reed's law says that the utility of large networks, particularly social networks, can scale exponentially with the size of the network. It places a high value on the number of possible sub-groups within the community, so that the network effect of potential group membership can eventually dominate the overall economics of the system.
- Metcalfe's law states that the value of a communication system grows as approximately the square of the number of users of the system (N²). The law is often illustrated with 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 you may send and receive documents increases. This contrasts with traditional models of supply and demand, where increasing the quantity of something decreases its value.