The Network Effect, or Metcalfe’s Law, states that the value of a communications network is proportional to the square of the number of its users. Here’ Bob Metcalfe’s original slide illustrating that fact:

Whether or not it is correct, Metcalfe’s Law illustrates the value of the Network Effect, that the more people, devices and IP-aware vacuum cleaners there are on the “network”, the better. Heck, that’s been the assumption we’ve always used to justify the expansion of communications networks for ages.

You’d think Metcalfe’s Law would also apply to social networks, ie the more “friends” you have on your social network the more rich and complete your life is. Apparently that’s not the case. According the Dunbar Number, the maximum number of stable relationships us humans can have is 150. Any more and things would go quite wobbly. From the Economist:

Primatologists call at least some of the things that happen on social networks “grooming”. In the wild, grooming is time-consuming and here computerisation certainly helps. But keeping track of who to groom—and why—demands quite a bit of mental computation. You need to remember who is allied with, hostile to, or lusts after whom, and act accordingly. Several years ago, therefore, Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist who now works at Oxford University, concluded that the cognitive power of the brain limits the size of the social network that an individual of any given species can develop. Extrapolating from the brain sizes and social networks of apes, Dr Dunbar suggested that the size of the human brain allows stable networks of about 148. Rounded to 150, this has become famous as “the Dunbar number”.

Facebook reports that the average number of “friends” subscribers have is 120, corresponding closely to the Dunbar number. However, they also note that the size of the real social network is actually quite smaller, with men responding with any frequency to only seven of those friends online, and women responding to only 10. Having 500 friends doesn’t seem to increase things much either.

The upshot of all this is twofold. Thankfully, the amount of FB “friends” you have is not really related to your Dunbar-150 and that social networks are really more of broadcasting than networking medium. The network effects of your “friends” beyond  a handful is very limited. Frankly, I find this a relief.

An Exabyte is a lot of data. (An exabyte is 10¹⁸ bytes, or one billion gigabytes.) According to MINTS, five to eight exabytes flow through the internet each month. All this data has led to  predictions that the coming deluge of data from all the new video sites and other traffic congestion would flood the Internet.

TRU has seen its commodity internet transit traffic grow over the last few years. In aggregate with other BC Universities, this is an impressive and scary curve and would lead anyone to believe that the exaflood has arrived. Check out the blue line below.

But is the internet really growing?  In an Economist article, Andrew Odlyzko of the University of Minnesota talks about Internet traffic growth actually slowing, not increasing. This may be caused in part by the slowing of growth in peer-to-peer network traffic and the move to video web streaming sites like youtube or hulu.

This is now being confirmed by Canadian traffic patterns. CBC’s Search Engine PodCast #21 talks about the fact that Canadian ISP’s traffic growth is actually falling by 45%!

This all goes against the ISP’s issues with the Net Neutrality bill going before Canadian Parliament. They want to control traffic on the network so that their content offerings like TV and Movie downloads can compete with other services like Skype. In effect, they want a fast-lane and slow-lane on the superhighway.

But Network Expansionists fear not, these numbers are dealing with network growth not usage. There is still a requirement for developing new network technologies and installation of dark-fibre to ensure that traffic congestion is minimized and the exa-flood is averted.

Things weren’t going well before Tuesday. We continue to battle a serious defect in the code of our student email system – and with 51,000 active accounts this is no easy thing to debug. For the last four weeks, Carla Granberg  has been working miracles on this issue and there may be light at the end of the tunnel.  On this one, to quote Winston Churchill – “it’s not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” Thank you students for your continued patience on this matter.

If this wasn’t bad enough, on Tuesday morning a particularly virulent strain of computer virus slipped through our defenses to hit us hard.  By the time we were able to effect a patch that afternoon, the virus has completely knocked out 100’s of PC’s. Work will continue through the weekend to eradicate the havoc this  virus had caused.

Now it’s Friday the 13th and we may be fighting the effects of the above or some other virus which is trying to perform a denial of service attack from our infected systems. Oh Joy.

This brings up the IT Department burden. Well run IT must be invisible. It’s like Disneyland. All you see are characters, smiling kids and fun. But behind the colourful facades there is a factory run on IT and animatronics. The trick to running a good theme park (or university) is to keep that IT machine hidden.

This week the springs and gears are showing…

Ok I’m back – but instead of a hard hitting treatise on enterprise systems, structurational models or cloud computing, today I’d like to talk about vacuum cleaners. You see there was a big sale on iRobot Roombas at London Drugs this week and I snapped up the last one in town – apparently. For the uninitiated, Roombas are the robotic vacuum/sweeper that rolls around like a special-needs pet, bumping into walls and sweeping things up along the way. The Roomba’s have a certain charm – my daughter quickly nicknamed it the “Lil Dude.”

Roomba’s have been around for years, purchased by early adopter geeks and gadget freaks to handle household chores. You can now buy Roomba’s to scrub your floors, clean your pool, gutters and mow your lawn.

But all this pretense of buying robots to do housework mask the real fun thing about roombas – taking them apart and getting them to do other things. Now that the price of the device has fallen, the fun can begin and the “hacks or mods” can get started. Roombas come with a bluetooth port so you can get them doing all sorts of silly things via remote control, via your web browser or mobile phone.

Like it or not, here come the robots… My son is busy planning to build Roomba “battlebots” and other mods on devices, just like he does with his Nerf guns. For those not wanting to roll up their sleeves, you can soon break down and buy a Rovio, the distance babysitter.

Now Lil Dude  – get me a beer.