Cascades
Cascades are one of the most observable concepts we have covered this semester. Why is Facebook so stable? Why did Google+ fail? The answer is cascading effects in networks. I have over 500 friends on Facebook. If Facebook were a country, it would be the third largest in the world. Basically, the likelihood that the majority of people you know have a Facebook is very high. How did this happen? How did Facebook get to be so big? A small group of people started using it and it spread through friend groups. As a portion of people’s friend groups began to use Facebook, the whole group used it and so forth. Now, Google+ attempted to create this phenomenon again, but the problem was people did not have a reason to leave Facebook. There is a large “buy in” price for Google+. You need to get an account and convince all of your friends to join as well. The larger the network, the more powerful, and the more valuable. In a sense Facebook can be thought of as “too big to fail” and too big to be re-done.