Metcalfe´s Law after 40 Years of Ethernet

Critics have declared Metcalfe´s law, which states that the value of a network grows as the square of the number of its users, a gross overestimation of the network effect, but nobody has tested the law with real data. Using a generalization of the sigmoid function called the netoid, Ethernet´s inventor and the law´s originator models Facebook user growth over the past decade and fits his law to the associated revenue. The Web extra at http://youtu.be/m_agCPNGOzU is a video interview with Bob Metcalfe about the creation of the first Ethernet local area network 40 years ago at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center.