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How? “Seven friends in ten days,” Facebook growth hackers repeated like a mantra in the early years, a humming meditation that carried them from dorm room to nearly every corned of the world232. If you or I joined the service and found seven friends in ten days, we would most likely stay, enjoying the benefits of the gated world, making it that much harder (impossible really) for friend number eight to wander somewhere else. Pretty soon, there was essentially nowhere else to go anyhow. The network magnetism worked so well that, as a result, Facebook’s speed-looping connection machine cut the famous “six degrees of separation” posited by Stanley Miligram – the number of leaps between any two people on the planet – to four.233

Network theorists who came after Arthur call these “rich get richer” systems “power law distributed” because if you line up all the firms in a digital industry you find the winners are exponentially – by a power of ten or one hundred – ahead of everyone else. They slip free from the average gravitational center of a normal bell curve that marks most traditional business. A normal distribution would shape up like a chart of people who own cars: 20 percent driving Fords, 10 percent Nissans and Toyotas, and so on. Or it might look like the distribution of height: Most men are between 5’7 and 5’11, but 50% are scattershotted at different heights. Network systems, however, can breed commanding winners. It’s not like 50% of online users are on the Internet and others are scattered across different systems. Users huddle into single winning clusters. It’s as if 90% of the world always bought a Ford; or 90% of people were exactly 5’ 11”. These systems run faster and better and more profitably because they are locked-in, gated by technology standards and by common connection. When we say that networks crave gates, this is the sort of gate we mean. If you had to look for your friends one-by-one on Facebook, Friendster, MySpace, and GooglePlus you’d exhaust yourself. So, one winner emerges. Data scientists attribute the success of these winning nodes to “preferential attachment” – the idea that if Brian Arthur is using Microsoft Word and I’m using it you are likely to do so too. But there’s another secret: More widespread adoption makes the whole system faster. Winner-take-all marks that network hunger for the compression of time.234

There’s an additional feature at work in the very newest of these billion-user clusters that’s worth our attention: It’s not merely that we’ll use them because everyone seems to be doing so, it’s also that as more users weave themselves into each others’ lives and the machines into too, these nodes of power get smarter. Google Maps can predict the fastest route from your house to your office because it can watch the movements of hundreds of millions of users, each silently pinging their location and speed as they creep through rush hour or sprint down an empty motorway. As more people use GPS enabled devices, the quality of this data gets

232 The network magnetism: Chamath Palihapitiya, “How we put Facebook on the path to 1 billion users.” Udemy Growth Hacking: An Introduction lecture published January 9, 2013 and available on YouTube.
233 Winner-take-all: van der Hofstad, p 24
234 But there’s another secret: Albert-Lazlo Barabási “Network Science”,
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: (2013) 371

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