Metcalfe's Law Refuted

pdp0x14 writes "Cnet News reports on a powerful refutation of Metcalfe's Law (that the value of a network goes up with n^2 in the number of members). The academic paper is available at Southwest Missouri State University. Basically, the thesis is that not all the links in a network are equally valuable, so Metcalfe's argument that everyone can connect to everyone (n(n-1)/2 links, roughly n^2) is irrelevant. The authors propose nlog(n) instead, a much smaller increase."

Comments

misattribution

[Anonymous Coward]

The link that the submission attributes to Southwest Missouri State University is actually at the University of Minnesota... (Not terribly surprising, given that Odlyzko is at the University of Minnesota!) Please correct the article accordingly.

No need to go that far.

[uberdave]

Slashdot itself is a good counter-example.