Metcalfe's law

[met-kafs law]

noun

Telecommunications.

1. the principle that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users: the more users there are in a system, the more value an individual perceives, considered against the cost of joining a network community.

Word History and Origins

Origin of Metcalfe's law¹

First recorded in 1990-95; named after Robert M. Metcalfe (born 1946), U.S engineer and entrepreneur who helped pioneer the internet in 1970 and invent the Ethernet

Example Sentences

This can be summed up with Metcalfe's Law, explains Evan Prodromou, co-author and current editor of ActivityPub, another open social media architecture, which is behind popular platforms like Meta's Threads.

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Non-profits like Free Our Feeds and the Social Web Foundation, which Mr Prodromou heads, have a strategy that they hope will help them overcome that Metcalfe's Law.

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But because capitalism never knows when to stop, eventually even the exponential growth rate promised by Metcalfe’s law wasn’t good enough for Google and co.

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In the 1980s, Bob Metcalfe tried to quantify the multiplier effect of additional users with what became known as Metcalfe’s law, which says that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users.

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Silicon Valley’s version is Metcalfe’s law, named after one of the inventors of Ethernet, a pivotal technology for computer-to-computer contact.

Read more on The New Yorker