{"id":246,"date":"2003-12-31T03:29:00","date_gmt":"2003-12-31T07:29:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/wp\/?p=67"},"modified":"2003-12-31T03:29:00","modified_gmt":"2003-12-31T07:29:00","slug":"who-stole-the-network-effects","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/2003\/12\/who-stole-the-network-effects\/","title":{"rendered":"Who stole the network effects?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s Dec 31, and time to see how my\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/2002\/09\/Blog\/\/2003\/01\/04#2003-01-ws-predictions\">past predictions<\/a> have done.<\/p>\n\n<p>I predicted that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.xmethods.net\">XMethods<\/a> would list less\nthan 400 services by today, and lo-and-behold, that&#8217;s the case; they list\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/2002\/04\/WebServicesGrowth\/\">366<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n<p>Am I psychic?  Have I hacked XMethods?  Nope, I just performed simple\nlinear extrapolation.  Why linear?  Because Web services have extraordinarily poor\nnetwork effects; their growth has been roughly a function of time, not a function\nof the size of the existing population as you&#8217;d expect to see in an Internet\nscale network (like email, instant messaging, or the Web) which benefits from\n<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Metcalfe's_law\">Metcalfe&#8217;s law<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n<p>I also predicted that the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/2001\/tag\/\">TAG<\/a> would\nreject the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/TR\/webarch\/\">Web Services Architecture document<\/a>.\nOf course, that document hasn&#8217;t progressed very far, and will apparently only be published\nas a Note, meaning it will never be reviewed by the TAG.<\/p>\n\n<p>So here&#8217;s a challenge to Web services promoters; make a prediction about the\nnumber of Web services available on the Internet by the end of 2004 and\/or 2005.\nIf they&#8217;re so great, then surely, at some point, there&#8217;s going to be thousands\nof them, right?  When will that be?  At this rate, they won&#8217;t get to 1000 until\n2010 &#8230; assuming the hype &#8211; which is the only thing keeping them even linear, IMO &#8211;\nlasts that long.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It&#8217;s Dec 31, and time to see how my past predictions have done. I predicted that XMethods would list less than 400 services by today, and lo-and-behold, that&#8217;s the case; they list 366. Am I psychic? Have I hacked XMethods? Nope, I just performed simple linear extrapolation. Why linear? Because Web services have extraordinarily poor [&hellip;]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-246","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=246"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}