How Asymmetry Scales

Josh Porter predicts at his Bokardo blog that Facebook will go asymmetric. Until now, Facebook has had a "symmetrical" model of social network, where in order to establish a relationship, both sides need to have each other as connections. When you send a "friend request", the recipient must friend you back so you can see their profile and activity. By contrast, Twitter has an "asymmetric" network. People can follow you, and you don't need to follow them back for them to see your updates.

Porter calls out two key reasons why Facebook may go asymmetric. Asymmetric networks are a a good fit for anyone with a level of community fame, not just organizations, consumer brands and popular bands. Facebook is making it's "Pages" feature more robust - these are pages that a brand or organization can set up. People can choose to be "fans" of that organization, and the organization does not need a mutual connection. In addition to helping popular organizations and people, asymmetric networks help people manage their attention. If you are even modestly popular, with over 100-200 followers, the number of updates from followers can be deafening. In an asymmetric network, you don't need to pay attention to every update from everyone following you.

There are a couple of other key reasons why asymmetric networks scale better, in addition to helping the popular. In Twitter there are a number of ways where asymmetry in a public network provides good returns to scale, as I noted in a post on my personal blog on premature predictions of peak Twitter

• In Twitter, it is common to "Retweet" an interesting link or quote, to share it with your followers. Retweets disseminate information across social networks
• Twitter searches makes it easy to find information outside of one's personal network
• Visible "mentions" - the feature that shows that shows when someone mentions you even if you're not following them, allow you to hail and engage people in conversation, and have others start conversations with you, even if you're not following them.

These features mean that the more people who join the network, the more interesting information will be amplified through it, and the more potentially interesting people you may discover. The level of context is fairly high - you can see what someone else has been Twittering, and see if they are interesting and relevant to you. And the level of obligation is low (you can follow someone without giving them the burden of accepting or rejecting you). In Facebook, I can see when someone that I don't know has commented on the update of someone I do know, but then I need to "friend" a stranger in order to learn more about them. Facebook's mostly-symmetrical, mostly closed network makes it hard to learn new things and meet new people outside your existing network.

So, the reasons for asymmetry aren't just about supporting fame, but enabling discovery with low social expense.

This is an edited version of a post that first appeared here.

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