How social media came to be so powerful

Four major forces have converged to make social media as powerful and dynamic as it is.

1) Moore's Law, which indicates that the power of silicon substrates doubles around every 18 months.
2) Metcalfe's law, which states that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users of the system (n²).
3) The free availability of storage, which continues to drop in price and soar in terms of ubiquity. Today's cellphones typically contain 2GB to 16GB of storage.
4) Widely available bandwidth - 3G, for instance, costs a fraction of what it did a decade ago.


These four factors mean anyone, anywhere, can be connected to anyone anywhere else, at a marginal cost. This has blown the market wide open for any kind of communication between any two or more parties.

Tomorrow, we will examine how the ability to communicate in a limitless fashion is being fulfilled, and how to start doing something about it.