Social Scalability and Web 2.0

by Francisco Lupiáñez-Villanueva, on October 19th, 2007

Graham Attwell introduces me the concept of social scalability as a key issue to manage Web 2.0 tools. Wikipedia defines scalability as

In telecommunications and software engineering, scalability is a desirable property of a system, a network, or a process, which indicates its ability to either handle growing amounts of work in a graceful manner, or to be readily enlarged (based on André B. Bondi, ‘Characteristics of scalability and their impact on performance‘, Proceedings of the 2nd international workshop on Software and performance, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, 2000, ISBN 1-58113-195-X, pages 195 - 203)

If Web 2.0 is about interaction, participation, produce/consume… we will have to think about either handle growing amounts of work in a graceful manner, or to be readily enlarged. These issues are related to the impact of social performance, both on line and off line.

Categories: Network Society, Web 2.0


mina. said

Scalability as a desirable property for systems

…but perhaps not for people at (net)work. Inmoderate (net)work growth and the same people performing it leads to less social or even personal life in a relaxed manner, which is strongly required to mantain everybody’s mental health. Note that “networking” is the newest tag added to coffe meetings with colleagues/friends. It presumes that you are not allowed to have friends and not to be “networking” with them.

We must allow ourselves to get some holydays from time to time. By the way, scalability is not a word that presumes you can’t erase what you have done before, or that you must always be there to continue the work you started.

Is anybody recording a motion picture, where you can’t stop “being scalable” if you don’t want to come out of the plot?