Robert Scoble on early adopter angst and Duncan Watts

Robert Scoble has a good post that has got me thinking way too much for a Sunday morning: Early adopter angst

If I get arrogant about the role of early adopters (some people call them influencers, or “passionates”) it’s because I’ve seen they are the ones who drive society. You really think that guy who I saw the other day on the plane using Windows 2000 and an old version of Lotus Notes is driving society? Riiiigggghhhhtttt.

At a gut level this makes so much sense. I can so relate to much of what he says. I had even started a little social networking research project around this whole concept that WAS making good progress. All before I started reading the work of Duncan Watts a professor of Sociology at Columbia, and currently a Principle Research Scientist at Yahoo Research. His reseach (pdf warning): Influentials, Networks, and Public Opinion Formation

But what exactly does the two-step flow say about influentials, and how precisely do they exert influence over the (presumably much larger) population of non-influentials? In the remainder of this article we argue that although the dual concepts of personal influence and opinion leadership have been extensively documented, it is nevertheless unclear exactly how, or even if, the influentials of the two-step flow are responsible for diffusion processes, technology adoption, or other processes of social change. By simulating a series of formal models of diffusion that are grounded in the mathematical social science literature, we find that there are indeed conditions under which influentials are likely to be disproportionately responsible for triggering large-scale “cascades” of influence, and that under these conditions, the usual intuition regarding the importance of influentials is supported. These conditions, however, appear to be the exception rather than the rule—under most conditions that we consider, influentials are only modestly more important than average individuals. In the models that we have studied, in fact, it is generally the case that most social change is driven not by influentials, but by easily influenced individuals influencing other easily influenced individuals.

And therein lies my dilemma. Watts' research challenges the predominant thinking on how the diffusion of innovation occurs. Watts' work changes the game completely, and even challenges the reasoning that has led to the creation of entire institutions.

For me personally, his work has left me in a state of suspended animation. I want to completely understand his findings before I continue charging blindly along the old path. Which totally makes me sad because what we were working on was way cool, but if the assumptions the work was based on are not true--what's the point?

Which brings me back to Robert's post. If there is "early adopter angst" it may very well be occurring within an echo chamber.

For a less academic read on the subject I recommend this Fast Company article: Is the Tipping Point Toast?

QOTD: Hal Meeks on educational technology

This was picked from an email by Hal Meeks to our TLTR mailing list in reaction to this post from the Chronicle of Higher Education: Is E-Learning Forever Trapped in a Field of Dreams?

There are many more serious problems facing higher education. Use of
technology illustrates some of these problems, as is the willingness
to blame technology and its misapplication. It is akin to blaming a
cell phone for a boring conversation.

Do Internet users evolve?

Are users of social networking sites more highly evolved Internet users? I've heard that most users of portals are new users, meaning people from countries just expanding their telecommunications systems to bring more people online. Now I see this report on Internet use in China about how BBS systems are all the rage: Old School BBS: The Chinese Social Networking Phenomenon:

According to a report produced by iResearch Consulting Group in 2007, around 36.3% of users in China spend 1-3 hours per day on BBS sites, about 44.7% of users spend 3-8 hours, and even 15.1% of users are on BBS sites for more than 8 hours each day. Over 60% of users will log in to at least 3 BBS sites more than 3 times each week.

So China is taking the Internet back to the 90s? Do any of you read BBSs anymore? I haven't in years. I asked this question to a group of colleagues recently, and not a single one of them were regular readers of forums either.

So what is going on in China? Is this a trend that will persist, using the old tools, or will they evolve to more socially mediated systems in time?

iGoogle growth

Interesting post at TechCrunch on the growth of iGoogle: iGoogle Google’s Homegrown Star Performer This Year

According to figures from comScore Google traffic increased 22.42% this year across its main web properties (excluding non-US sites and acquired sites such as YouTube). The star performer for the year was Google’s personalized start page service iGoogle which increased traffic in the 12 months to November by 267.64%.

Of course, in total numbers of users we're not talking about that impressive of a figure. This is important, however, in that it shows the beginning of the move to the personal start page. I've predicted before that I thought this is how the average person would make the leap into consuming syndication feeds.

Google introduced their personal start page technology late. They didn't even name their service until last May, and only then after I made fun of them: Google IG becomes iGoogle. Since then the growth has been dramatic. I think it's also important to note that Google (with a heck of a lot of help from Facebook) has pretty much knocked-out their competition in this space.

If you're trying to help people get started with reading feeds, a personal start page is definitely the path of least resistance. Way easier, and less overwhelming than showing them a feed reader. Most people take one look at a feed reader and think, "I don't have time to read all that stuff." iGoogle is the perfect gateway technology. It will be interesting to watch the growth this next year.

Writing on your phone

I saw this at TechCrunch and it caught my attention: In Japan Half The Top Selling Books Are Written On Mobile Phones

With all the talk about Amazon’s Kindle, there’s a bigger revolution taking place and those who studied classic literature will be horrified. In Japan, half of the top ten selling works of fiction in the first six months of 2007 were composed on mobile phones.

Where there is a will there is a way... Motivated people will find a way to express themselves in spite of the technological barriers. When people say they don't like a technology they are almost always complaining about something else. Your mission, should you decide to take it, is to try to discover the real reason. If you focus on just the technological aspects you will miss the whole social dimension.

You're it! on the the tagging hype cycle

Joe Lamantia at You're It! has a good read on the tagging hype cycle that I mentioned yesterday, Is Tagging A Disruptive Innovation?:

I don’t think the Hype Cycle comparison holds. In simple financial terms, I’m not aware of anyone making or losing substantial amounts of money specifically in relation to tagging. For many reasons, tagging has not yet emerged - and may never emerge - as a category of technology investment and activity for businesses.

Which is a better way of saying what I said yesterday -- that tagging hasn't emerged, and I suspect that he is right that it may never emerge.

Lamantia on tagging as a disruptive technology, however:

...underlying this impact assessment is the larger question of whether tagging is a disruptive innovation: will tagging change the shape of the metadata management ecosystem? Will tagging lead to new niches?

In comparison to established metadata management solutions, tagging shows several of the characteristics of disruptive innovations:

• tagging is cheaper
• tagging has low entry barriers
• tagging is self-service

A tale of disintermediation: photographic edition

The road to irrrelevancy is all too familiar. I saw this at The Future of Publishing about photography, but it would apply to almost any technology. After all, it's not really about technology but about people. People's reactions are basically the same no matter the reason their old ways of working are being rendered obsolete.

• First response: “This digital stuff is kind of interesting, but it’s not applicable to our business.”
• Second response: “These digital scanners are really crummy. The results look horrible. And the software stinks.”
• Third response: “Digital cameras! Have you seen Canon’s? The pictures are dark and low resolution.”
• Fourth response: “Where are the color printers for these ugly pictures?”
• Fifth response: “These color printers are expensive and only make the pictures look worse.”
• Sixth response: “The scanners are getting better and cheaper. So is the software. So are the printers.”
• Seventh response: “But this is all too complicated. Consumers will never figure out how to use this stuff, even if they can afford the money and the effort.”
• Eighth response: “The high-end cameras and scanners are getting pretty good, but nowhere near as good as what we’ve got now.”
• Ninth response: “Hmmm. Quality is getting close to conventional. Prices are dropping. It’s all much easier to use. I wonder if this could have an impact on our business?”
• Tenth response: “Man the lifeboats!”

About the only thing missing from the list is people's willingness to share their creations. Who would have anticipated the nearly 40 million photos on Flickr being released under a Creative Commons license?

Embracing lazy searchers

You need look no further than Google's own numbers to know why they made the radical change to universal search. This table from Hitwise Intelligence: Google Universal Search tells the whole story:

Basically, other than image searching people aren't using any of Google's vertical search capabilities. Take Google News as an example--it's total usage is .94%. You can be sure that people searching Google News is but a small fraction of those users.

It was numbers like these which led me to say last month: The semantic Web is dead?

If you look at user behavior you can see the future, and it is one of compromised and scaled-down functionality rather than more. Less scales. You see this being played-out in the discussion of Google's new universal search. The question is being asked, "Google Universal Search - is Vertical Search Space Finished?" The answer to that question is a resounding yes!

As big as Google is, and as large as its user base, long tail thinking does not extend to the service industry. The long tail works just fine with something like iTunes where providing access to niche content costs next to nothing. Services on the other hand don't scale so well. Services require care, and feeding, and costly human attention. Google may be rolling in cash, but no service business can afford to ignore their core customers.

There's little to be gained by focusing on 1% of your user base unless you have good reason to believe that they are the early adopters. If you think those 1% are ahead of the masses then you are justified in trying to cater to them. This is not what is happening with search -- it's going the other direction -- and that is exactly why you saw Google unveil their universal strategy.

Pew: The other 41%

I've been chewing a tad more on the new Pew Internet & American Life Project report. Something has been gnawing at me. These numbers just don't seem to add up. I suspect that my discomfort will be found somewhere in the fact that this is a U.S. based population, and that it dismissed the U18s from the study. Regardless, I'm still struggling to derive some meaning. I'll let you know when I actually determine the source of my discomfort.

That said, I did find this discussion of the Pew report at Headshift of interest: What are we doing for the other 41% of people we want to reach?

The natural conclusion, I think, is that we need to give these people a lot more support, and perhaps also stop using divisive dot.com language about people who "get it" and people who don't. In terms of support, I have in mind a kind of learning, mentoring and ... linkfeeding* that aims for joyful empowerment rather than boring old training in using tools you have to use. I hear so many anecdotes about the joy people get from turning somebody on to some useful online service, site or shared space - what we call those headshift moments, which people don't forget in a hurry. Surely we should be doing the same inside companies, rather than boring them half to death with training?

I like that, "joyful empowerment". The question is what strategies can we use to help people realize what they are missing--where they too can experience that "Ahhh haaaa" moment.

Back in 1993 you could show someone Mosaic and they could immediately understand that the world as they had experienced it was fixing to change big-time. That almost never happens with Web 2.0 tools. Most of the time you get a response like John Dorner received last week, "I was trying to explain Twitter to my wife - she looks at me like I've lost my mind." I've noticed that same reaction more than once over the last few years.

Adoption of these new tools takes longer. I know I used del.iciou.us for months before I finally started using it religiously. I also know, that my use of it increased dramatically once my closest group of colleagues all started to use it. It wasn't until we had workgroup adoption that its true power kicked-in to play.

All this has gotten me to thinking about strategies to speed adoption. If we know that adoption is going to take a series of interventions over time, what does the successful strategy look like? The good people at Headshift had these thoughts:

You can't teach people about social networking and knowledge sharing using Web 1.0 online learning systems. Canned "content objects" delivered by an LMS are for McJobs, not knowledge workers...

I think they are mostly right, but I'm wondering if there doesn't need to be something even more sophisticated? This is all about social networking and knowledge sharing. I'm thinking the interventions need to be targeted at entire social networks. Is it enough to target the early adopters and assume that they will somehow "turn" the other seven people in their group? Is that not a pre 2.0 approach? If we only target the early adopters, I'm thinking those people will get the same reaction John received from his spouse. Perhaps we need to be providing those early adopters a tad more cover.

How did you get started twittering?

I first learned about Twitter from listening to this podcast of a presentation made by Ryan Frietas at the Adaptive Path User Experience Conference. I'm wondering how others first learned about Twitter? I'm going to pose this question to Twitter and see if it gets any response. A Twitter survey (TS)? I posed a question to Twitter once before: Twitter to crush Yahoo! Answers?, and did get responses. So it's time for another installment of Twitter Answers (TA). This time I'm hoping the question will spread across the Twitterverse. Keep your eyes on the tag cloud.

BTW, every person in my immediate work group is twittering now. I'm making the assumption that they learned about Twitter from me? Back in January I issued this challenge:

Will Twig start blogging before July 1, 2007? Once we've accomplished that we'll change our focus to Jason: Will Jason start twittering before December 2007?

In response to this challenge Jason was heard to say something about a snowball and purgatory. As it turns out he wasn't even the last one in our group to start. :) He started twittering in March. The last holdout was Ben who sent his first tweet this past Thursday.

I'm still less than optimistic that we will succeed in convincing Twig to begin blogging before July. Maybe we could count her twittering as a microblog and declare success?

How did you get started? Tell us with a tweet.

Voice in Second Life - it's coming

We've been able to do voice in Second Life for a while now using Skype and other 3rd party voice technologies. It's suffered from two shortfalls: 1) Your avatar didn't know you were speaking so it was disconnected from the input, and 2) your voice was directly from RL, and that is most definitely an issue for a good number of people.

The Linden's announced last week that voice is coming to Second Life, and it sounds like it does a great job of addressing the first issue:

Voice in Second Life will offer high-quality communication capabilities with 3D “proximity-based” voice communication. This technology uses spatial awareness, taking distance, direction, and rotation into account, for a more realistic experience. Basically, you’ll be able to tell who is talking in a group since the voice will sound like it’s coming from that direction. We’re also working hard on an initial set of avatar animations, which change and trigger according to the intensity of speech.

That sounds very nice. One of the more interesting things in SL right now is the way your avatar will pay attention to someone who is chatting. It just flat works. When doing voice over Skype inworld it was easy to have your avatar fall asleep from inattention. What was happening inworld became totally secondary to the voice communication. Where it worked, it just didn't work when it would disconnect you from the SL experience. For the most part text chatting was actually richer.

The second issue of having your avatar speak in your RL voice is also an issue. Linden doesn't have a solution for this just yet:

At present we’re not offering voice modulation or modification. We understand than some Residents may wish to preserve their anonymity even further by disguising their voice. Those that wish can use third party software to modify their voice, but when evaluating it as a standard feature we found the existing technologies just not able to deliver a high-quality result.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. I think that RL voice has the potential to change some existing social networks. I could see some communities dividing over this, or at least having the potential to lose some significant nodes.

Linden says this is coming at the end of March. It's definitely a needed technology, but like any new development it will have both positive and negative effects. I'm anxious to give this a try, and also to observe what impacts it might have on the SL experience. I don't expect that it will be immediately adopted as the default method for communication.

The Empty Quarter

Andrew McAfee discusses who in organizations is adopting social networking software or as he calls it “Enterprise 2.0” tools, Evangelizing in the Empty Quarter.

The ‘empty quarter‘ of non-adopters is the upper right-hand section of this graph. These are the folk who are relatively unlikely to pick up new tools and run with them.

But so what? It‘s unrealistic to expect 100% adoption of any new technology that‘s not mandatory, so there‘s always going to be an empty quarter (I have it on good authority, for example, that there are still faculty at Harvard who have their emails printed out and brought to them.). Given this, why should a business leader care about Enterprise 2.0‘s empty quarter? After all, it‘s only going to shrink over time as newbies continue to enter the workforce. In addition, some of the people in the empty quarter will probably benefit from the new technologies, even if they don‘t use them. They might read another employees blog and learn something, for example, even if they don‘t blog themselves. So why not just leave the inhabitants of the empty quarter be?

I think Andrew does an excellent job of describing the problem of getting people to adopt new technologies. It is no small challenge, and the “empty quarter” metaphor describes the issue perfectly. But, as a person who has actually been to the Empty Quarter I can tell you that it is like no place anyone in western culture has ever experienced (unless they‘ve actually been there). This is why I struggle a bit with the somewhat naive solutions he suggests.

The great majority of companies today are far from this scenario because their empty quarters are so large. Are there effective ways to evangelize within it and convert people to Enterprise 2.0 tool use? One strategy is to keep working on the tools themselves, making them more obvious and easy to use. This is certainly a good idea, but I don‘t have a lot of confidence that it‘ll bear a lot of fruit in the empty quarter. Old habits die hard, and the 9X problem of email is particularly acute among non-techies.

A more promising strategy, I believe, lies at the intersection of coaching, leading by example, and policy-setting. Of these, policy setting is the least obvious and most risky, what would a pro-blogging policy look like, and what would keep it from backfiring? I‘ve heard a couple clever examples. A Google employee at a conference I attended, for example, said that employees there sent a short (five line) email to a specific address each week, telling what they‘d done. These became part of a searchable archive.

Right, that‘ll work. Nice try Andrew, but you‘re dreaming here. One should never try to fix, trick, or otherwise impose solutions on a space like the empty quarter. You can only work on the peripheries, because once you venture into the desert you are in a completely different world. I suggest a better strategy is one that has been the model for diffusing innovation for the ages. You find those key actors that are comfortable living in both worlds, and focus your efforts there. You can‘t focus your attention on the whole. You must find those innovators that reside in San‘a, but that occasionally like to visit with the good people in Mar‘ib.

When I was in the empty quarter we stopped at a little Bedouin village for several hours to wait for some others who were traveling with us. (That‘s a long story for another day.) As we pulled into the village my driver says, “Stay close to me Dr. Gamble these are very dangerous people.” If you are the person venturing into the empty quarter you must do so with great care. It isn‘t that the non-adopters are indifferent, they can be dangerous. They won‘t ignore you, they will actively work to undermine your efforts. You are messing with their space and changing the organizational balance of power. Never underestimate the ferociousness that the Bedouins will resist your efforts to modernize them.