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Social Networks - MySpace, Friendster, Facebook and LinkedIn lead the charge to map out people’s relationships on the Internet. They used the best technology that they had access to at the time: a Delaware Corporation and racks of privately owned servers. This concentrated enormous amounts of power and capital in the hands of a few Silicon Valley C... See more

Ric Burton • Social Networks & Sociable Protocols

The most successful enterprises today are networks - which extract as little value as possible so they can grow as big as possible - and the platforms on which those networks are built.

Jeff Jarvis • WHAT WOULD GOOGLE DO

I think I know the explanation, and it also explains why 80/20 is becoming even more prevalent, affecting our lives in mysterious and perplexing ways. The answer is in the burgeoning power of networks. The number and influence of networks has been growing for a long time, at first a slow increase over the past few centuries, but since about 1970 th

Richard Koch • The 80/20 Principle

Wiener was as worldly as Shannon was reticent. He was well traveled and polyglot, ambitious and socially aware; he took science personally and passionately. His expression of the second law of thermodynamics, for example, was a cry of the heart: We are swimming upstream against a great torrent of disorganization, which tends to reduce everything to

James Gleick • The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

Even though some social networks have grown to include billions of people, the ramp up in communication hasn’t increased proportionally. Even as you add friends or follow users, you can only talk to so many. Facebook users with over 500 friends only actively communicate with between 10 to 20 people. Similarly, Twitter users who have follower counts... See more

Arjun Sethi • The Hive is the New Network

In the 1930s, Max Kleiber, a Swiss agricultural biologist, observed that, across mammal species, from shrews to elephants, the energy required to maintain basic metabolic function is closely correlated with an organism’s body size.

Jessica C. Flack • Worlds Hidden in Plain Sight: The Evolving Idea of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute, 1984–2019 (Compass)

Culture: Leading Scientists Explore Civilizations, Art, Networks, Reputation, and the Online Revolution (Best of Edge Series)

John Brockman

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Cover of Culture: Leading Scientists Explore Civilizations, Art, Networks, Reputation, and the Online Revolution (Best of Edge Series)

The bottom line is that the network as a whole can really only be stable if all the links are positive.

Robin Dunbar • Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships

Hal Varian, by the way, is the person who designed the Google ad auction. And it turned out he was only partially right about “information managers”. We call them influencers. But it was aggregators like Google that did the bulk of the heavy lifting. Computers can scale in ways that people can’t.