Can a social network become too large?

An article in the latest issue of The Economist explores the fact that there might be less to Facebook and other social network sites than meets the eye...  The basis of their argument is as follows:

[There is an] an important limitation for social networks, such as Facebook, compared with older sorts of network, such as the postal or telephone systems. These benefit from Metcalfe's Law, which says that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of its users. In other words, the more people have phones, the more useful they become. This “network effect” leads to rapid adoption and puts up barriers for new entrants.

But unlike other networks, social networks lose value once they go beyond a certain size. “The value of a social network is defined not only by who's on it, but by who's excluded,” says Paul Saffo, a Silicon Valley forecaster. Despite their name, therefore, they do not benefit from the network effect. Already, social networks such as “aSmallWorld”, an exclusive site for the rich and famous, are proliferating. Such networks recognize that people want to hobnob with a chosen few, not to be spammed by random friend-requests.

This suggests that the future of social networking will not be one big social graph but instead myriad small communities on the Internet to replicate the millions that exist offline.

Although I agree that social networking sites are not perfect at the moment, I don't think the reason is that they are too large, as The Economist suggests.  I want to fall back on one of my earlier posts, where I mentioned the importance of "weak ties" between people in separate network clusters to facilitate the flow of information in that network.  If the future of social network sites is really in "myriad small communities on the Internet" that are not connected in any way, each network in isolation will become pretty useless over time, since there will be no new information coming into or going out of that network. 

In order to have value (or social capital), a network needs to be (1) large, (2) open and (3) have (weak) ties between different clusters in that network.  Alexander van Elsas and Rolf Skyberg writes a lot of about the need for open social network sites, and I agree with their views and their thoughts on how this can be implemented.  The article in The Economist is an interesting read and it does raise some serious questions about the monetary value that is placed on Facebook and other sites at the moment, but I just don't think that smaller, isolated networks is the right way forward.