IEEE Spectrum: Metcalfe's Law is Wrong

IEEE Spectrum: Metcalfe's Law is Wrong: "Of all the popular ideas of the Internet boom, one of the most dangerously influential was Metcalfe's Law. Simply put, it says that the value of a communications network is proportional to the square of the number of its users.

The law is said to be true for any type of communications network, whether it involves telephones, computers, or users of the World Wide Web. While the notion of 'value' is inevitably somewhat vague, the idea is that a network is more valuable the more people you can call or write to or the more Web pages you can link to."