TheFeature writes about research showing that so-called "scale-free" networks are better, more robust designs than the alternative.
Using e-mail rather than SMS as the messaging medium for mobile phones has made mobile Internet services in Japan more successful than in the West, says an industry expert -- a claim supported by recently discovered mathematical properties of networks.
A scale-free network is one that consists of a few large "hubs" and many distributed "nodes". This isn't as abstract as it sounds. One example is simply the way people are organised socially. For instance, cultural information spreads easily across the world, without being dependent on a central arbiter or dispenser of information.
The researcher profiled in the article says that the same concept needs to be put to use when building communication networks. He says that email networks are scale-free whereas SMS networks are inherently hobbled by their network design. One quick-and-dirty measure of this difference in efficiency is that sending a message to 1000 people by email costs the same as sending the same message to 1 person, whereas SMS costs are proportional to the number of recipients. This, he says, is a lesson that designers of future networks must keep in mind for truly scalable architectures.
Interestingly, the same lesson is applicable to business as well, or even societies. A "value web" is likely to be far more robust and valuable than a value chain. I remember reading a study of the European mobile industry landscape about a year ago which made this very point -- that the industry is organised as a web rather than a vertical chain. I imagine the same is true of other fast-changing industries such as software, semiconductors and even media.
Link: TheFeature :: Email, Scale-Free Networks, and the Mobile Internet
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