Re: [Social-discuss] Adoption dynamics (and why your intuition fails)

[Odin Omdal Hørthe]

On Fri, May 28, 2010 at 10:16 PM, Nathan <address@hidden> wrote:
> If you've got an open decentralized social network.. then why would you need
> to invite anybody? to where exactly? and why a 'big bang', I can see why if
> you're 'just another silo' trying to play catch up with twitter, facebook et
> al - but not for this - unless of course, I completely misunderstand what
> everybodies thinking & talking about.
>
> Regardless though, virality (?sp), is completely built in - make good,
> useful tools, where the user controls their own destiny+data, and you're
> done - build it well and the masses will come, build it badly and.. well no
> loss in the scheme of things because other will build good things :)

I'm sorry but I don't think this holds true. To «switch» and start to
use a new service you really need a good incentive. Being
decentralized and caring about your data and privacy is *not enough on
it's own*. You won't just magically switch thereto.

I had a few friends switch to identi.ca when it came out. Identi.ca
had a very good point in being released, Twitter was having really big
back pains because it didn't scale; so suddenly there was a mass of
users. However, it didn't grow good enough, and most everyone
non-technical I know left identica because everyone was on twitter.

I will use a distributed social network (and probably make my own
node, my website is my profile etc); but it will be a hard challenge
to actually make it fun and usable. It's not that fun and usable if I
haven't got a whole lot of friends that I can share stuff with etc.

I can strongarm a few in, but from there, they're friends has to come
as well. If not they will not use it because «there's so few I can
friend» and then they will go back to Facebook. When I will be able to
put my mother into my «family» group, then this has succeeded. That
will take a long time... (She's been on Facebook a year now, and
loving it like nothing else).

Many of us want a change in the whole society, and then it's not just
enough that we can use it. We need a big bang if we are going to both
get our non-technical friends over, but also to keep them because they
need their friends etc.
-- 
Beste helsing,
Odin Hørthe Omdal <address@hidden>
http://velmont.no