Reed's Law: Why Facebook beat MySpace

blogs.forbes.com

3 pointsdrallison3 comments

The next social network will be the one that can provide different individuals allowing them to form dynamic groups around their interests, hobbies, and activities.

It will be much like high school cliques. They will be exclusive, relevant, and intimate. Individuals will have different cliques.

nice & concise article trying to explain why most socnetwrkng sites fail. my question/response is, is it as simple as creating "groups" for a site or is there a more complex, disciplined, and or structured approach to creating "groups"? I mean, a "Sexy Exhibitionsts" group might attract a lot of users but what kind of user community will that build as opposed to "Little Old Ladies Who Bake Cookies for Free"? There is a dynamic involved that i would like to try and breakdown in greater detail.

The Wikipedia article on Reed's Law, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reed%27s_law, is all about connectivity and the number and diversity of groups. That is just a resource waiting to be exploited, but there is no hint as to how the inherent grouping within a set of users can be exploited. That is where the magic comes in.

See also, Reed's Harvard Business Review article, The Law of the Pack, http://www.ecademy.com/downloads/reedslaw.pdf.

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