You’ve heard the term “scalability”. Scalability refers to the capacity of a site or service to grow exponentially. Before this term became popular in tech circles, however, it was documented in social network research.

Drs. Duncan Watts and Albert-Laszlo Barabasi literally wrote the book on the subject of the dynamics of scalability (Dr. Barabasi was kind enough to send me an advance copy, actually). The title “Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means” is a wonderful introduction for laypeople and experts alike to the dynamics of network-based systems like the internet.

All things being equal, it demonstrates why “first to market” is so important in these environments.  As “scale free networks” form over time, new connections (read as “users” or “customers”) are more likely to connect to providers (nodes) that already have lots of connections… a sort of “snowball effect”.  The image below (from Nature magazine) shows how early nodes have an advantage for attracting connections, thus giving structure to the overall network.  In scale free networks, connections don’t follow a random bell-curve (normal) distribution, but rather what analysts call a “power law” distribution.  All things being equal, once a scale-free network is established it’s unlikely that network nodes with lots of connections will ever lose significantly to newcomers.

However, all things are rarely equal.  Just because you are first to market doesn’t mean you offer better or more satisfying value.  Thus we enter “competition” into the equation, and “first to market” doesn’t guarantee that you will never lose your position on the top of the heap.  After the forerunners demonstrate the value of the market, we often see “wanna-bes” follow.  Most of the time, newcomers don’t displace the incumbent, and in the marketplace either fade away, get consumed, or find a smaller niche to cling to.    However, Dr. Barabasi and others have introduced a second type of scale-free network: the “fitness model”.  The fitness model presumes that each market participant offers a different level of value, satisfaction to its subscribers; the provider that offers the theoretical perfect service, that meets all of its subscribers needs and provides unflawed user experience would be considered to have 100% “fitness”.

What does the fitness model research tell us?  First, that incumbents can be displaced by newcomers that offer sufficiently greater value (greater fitness) to overcome inertia, brand loyalty, networks-of-friends, learning curves etc. can eventually displace firstcomers for market share.  Newcomers that provide equal, or slightly better value will stay behind… there is a sort of network inertia that resists newcomers whose only real offering is “option B”.

But here is the shocker - the research also shows that sometimes, if the newcomer’s fitness is high enough, a sort of “crystallization” can occur where they steal all the connections in a sort of massive upheaval.

What does this mean for Microsoft Bing? Microsoft released its new search engine with massive marketing efforts to displace Google.  But Google is very much the fat spider in the middle of the web right now for search engines with a 65% market share.  Given that Comcast’s July 2009 figures don’t show any big movement, I think it’s apparent that for most users, Bing isn’t sufficiently better than Google to displace it.  However, remember that Google wasn’t the first search engine either; despite being the latecomer in 1998 or so, it beat out Lycos, Excite, and AltaVista because it provided more relevant results and a simple GUI.

But the next big question: what about Twitter and its competition?  Twitter has a very strong microblogging niche, and has grown to over 30 million users by some sources.  It has successfully resisted newer services like Pownce, Jaiku, Plurk, and Friendfeed, and attempts by Facebook, LinkedIn and Plaxo to offer microblogging services.  But now Yahoo is stealthily rolling out a new microblogging service, Meme.  Despite Yahoo’s size and experience as an internet giant, that puts it in the “newcomer” seat, and we must ask the question - how much more fit is Meme than Twitter?  Is it better enough to make a difference?

If you are an invited beta user, let me know your thoughts.  But factor into the mix that Twitter has demonstrated many problems that put it far below “perfectly fit”, some of which are only now beginning to make an appearance:

• Constant technical / growth problems (you can join the Fail Whale club!  A recent attack on one user takes down all of Twitter!)
• The development of spam tweets - and no tools for intelligently filtering/rulesetting them (no, I don’t want to join your mafia).
• Surprise!  Results provided by the Twitter API may not match reality.
• Unrealistic exponential follower bases (I mean really, 1 in 10 Twitterers listen to everything twought by Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres?  Seriously?  Does anybody really know what having even 20,000 followers means?)

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