21st century technology adoption curves and Facebook and innovation

Everything changes. Now one of the changes that has intrigued me this past decade is in the nature of the technology adoption curve. Simply put, for most of my life, I was used to a particular adoption curve. In order to experiment with emerging technologies, you had to be 28-40, a high-achieving professional, working for a company in aerospace, defence, high-end manufacturing or investment banking. Before 28 you didn’t have the seniority, after 40 you were past experimenting and having fun, you spent all your time in the paranoid timewasting that characterises so much of large-organisation behaviour.

All that changed with Generation M. The pyramid sort of inverted overnight, as the mobile multitasking multimedia generation caught hold of life in their inimitable way. Now it’s the 14-25 year old who first gets to play.

I’ve known this for a while, and regularly referred to this inversion. But there were other aspects of this inversion that continued to intrigue me, inspired by reading Michael Schrage’s Serious Play many years ago. The connection between play and work, something that has come to the fore more resonantly with MMOG and Second Life and all that jazz.

When I saw the Netvibes ecosystem grow, I had the opportunity to watch this curve evolve and grow, and something stirred within me. There was something I could really learn from plotting it right, but in the end I moved on in my ADD way and sadly forgot about it. More recently, when I was watching the explosion taking place in Facebook Applications, I thought to myself, wow, what a proxy for the adoption curve. I had a second chance to view the culture in the petri dish.

What am I talking about? Have I finally completely lost it? Patience, patience. I’m going to try and cut and paste the list of current applications in Facebook Platforms:

I think there’s  a big lesson for us all in the data presented above. Just For Fun leads, then comes Utility some way behind, then comes Gaming. Music, Photo, Video and Messaging bunch up a little later, and Business is around half the size of any one of those.

I’m sure someone can write an app that plots the movement of numbers in each of these classifications over time, or make it possible for someone else to do it. Any views, Dave? Enjoying your travels?

Now this is the supply side. What would be even more interesting is the demand side and how that behaves across these classifications? How many people are using applications in each classification? I accept there is risk of misclassification or fuzzy overlaps, but I am not looking for exact sciences here, I think the trend information is good enough.

Any comments or views? Have I finally lost it? Let me know what you think.

An aside about airports

Paul Farnsworth, who works with me, told me about the existence of something like this video, where someone has modelled US air traffic. Fascinating. There’s something about traffic flows I really love, something that helps me understand more about what’s happening in a given space. Inflows and outflows, frequency and pattern, time and space dimensions. I’ve added it to my VodPod to make things easier for you. [I think Paul meant me to visit a different site that hosted something similar. I will link to that as and when I get the information from him.]

Musing on organisations and platforms

Some time ago I wrote a few posts about organisations and platforms, and considered the possibility of each firm becoming an open multisided platform. You can find the posts here, here and here.

Over the last month or so, I’ve landed up spending far too much time at airports, partially as a result of a complex travel schedule, primarily as a result of flight delays for a plethora of reasons. And it got me thinking.

Maybe open multisided software platforms are like airports. Maybe soon many organisations will look like airports as well. I know, I know, you think I should keep taking the tablets, but please bear with me. Just for a little while.

An airport is a marketplace, open and multisided. Anyone can go to an airport, embarking and disembarking passengers make up a small percentage of overall traffic. Some people pass through there. Some people work there. Some people, apparently, stay there.

There’s a primary purpose to the community: getting on or off planes that take you places.

And there’s a whole pile of activities that relate to the primary purpose:  Ticketing, Check-in, Security, Departure Lounges, Arrivals Lounges, Baggage Halls.

There’s also a set of activities that deal with special cases of the primary purpose: Immigration, Emigration, Tax Clearance. Health checks for would-be immigrants, sometimes even holding cells for illegal immigrants.

And there’s the usual feedback loop. Complaints counters. Lost Luggage counters.  Whatever.

Since there’s a lot of through traffic, there are a bunch of other things that happen, overlaps with other marketplaces. Airports are shopping malls. They have churches and other places of worship. They have restaurants and food halls, bookshops and nail salons, shoe-shine seats and children’s amusements, ice-cream parlours and pizza palaces. Airports sometimes have luxury shopping arcades with all those brands, the ones that would make great plays at Scrabble. [How come Paul Smith is the only designer I can think of with a “normal” name?].

People come to get and spend and lay waste their powers. So they need banks and cambios and wechsels and whatever, they need toilets and loos and restrooms and whatever. They need places to sit and stand and walk around and amble aimlessly, even to sleep. Sometimes, when flights get delayed, the borders between these places gets a bit fuzzy.

And to make all this happen, people actually work in airports as well. They too need places to call their own, places where they can change out of civvies and into clothes that say to everyone else “I work here”.

Everywhere there is motion. Of a sort. Queues form for no apparent reason, then disappear for similarly invisible ones.

In the old days, airports were fairly basic, there was no concept of customer or service or time or quality. In the old days, airports were about the primary purpose and nothing else. In fact you couldn’t even go there unless you were a departing or arriving passenger.  In the old days, airports tended to be locked-in components of an airline’s attempts at vertical integration, a classic monopoly play. In the old days, information about the status of flights and passengers and baggage was sparse and unreliable.

Now the monopolies are beginning to break, and customers are coming to the fore again. Conversing with each other. Occasionally transacting business as well. Fluid and active. Global and open and realtime.

Over time, a bunch of standards evolved to make this simpler and easier. I guess I’m an idealist: I think that airport gates are likely to be similar in dimensions, even if they get manufactured by a host of companies. That escalators and lifts are similar to some extent, even if they compete via a complex array of prices and bundles.  That passport sizes have converged over time. That Starbucks looks the same everywhere, as does Hermes or Harrods. That a loo is a loo is a loo.

Some airports are niche, serving a specific and narrow market. Some are satellites. Some are regional. Some are global. Some are domestic. Some are international. Some are everything and nothing.

You can go from airport to airport via coach or train or car, not just plane. You can do this privately or using public services. Airports collaborate and compete with each other.

Some things you can do online and in advance, some things you must do online, some things you can only do physically.

There’s a lot we can learn from airports, things we can apply to software and to organisation.

Open. Multisided.

Cory Doctorow on the Information Age

My partially-self-imposed silence has meant that I’ve got a long list of things I’ve wanted to blog about, a state that Sean has often claimed he’s in.  And one of the things I wanted to bring to your attention was Cory Doctorow’s 30 minute session being an Author@Google.  Here’s the link; I’ve also put it into my VodPod to make it easier.

He makes a beautiful argument for the Because Effect inherent in the Web, and for the way this generates wealth; somewhere along the line he shows just how Luddite we are becoming as a result of poorly thought out DRM (and similarly poorly-thought-out IPR in general); he takes us on an almost-tangential journey through some of the implications from the viewpoint of world trade and economic development; and he does all this with his trade-mark wry sense of humour (what did our futurists come up with? Not Google. Not even Expedia. But eBooks….).

The Luddism argument is particularly strong, something I’m sure many of you have considered before, something I know I have considered before. What Cory does is bring his storyteller strengths into the exposition of the argument. Delightful.

I’ve known Cory for a while now, not particularly well but well enough to know that we share common viewpoints on many things. If you haven’t seen it, I recommend you do, just to understand the kind of damage that can be wrought by bad DRM, and just how unnecessary and avoidable this is.

My thanks to Cory for a very entertaining half-hour. (Nb: The clip is actually an hour long when you take in the Q&A session at the end, where for some reason the sound quality dips).

Normal service is not resumed

You may have noticed that I’ve been pretty quiet of late. In terms of posts per day, this is the quietest month I’ve had since I started blogging. Now when you consider the fact that I had a major heart attack last December and still managed to blog pretty regularly, the emptiness of June 2007 takes some explaining. So here goes.

As with many things, it started with something apparently unconnected. Reason One was that I moved home. And it took me a while to get everything sorted out in my new home; for the first time in many years, I had a taste of what it felt like to be Without The Net. It felt strange, very strange.

Which brings me to Reason Two. My wife and I had had many discussions over the years, about the way computers could intrude into family life, in fact actually damage family life, if care was not taken. We’d learnt how to deal with television, to deal with time shifted TV, with video games, and even with computers…. or so we thought. Or so I thought, anyway. My wife disagreed with me. And guess what?

I was wrong. As laptops with wireless connections became the norm rather than the exception, and as social networking sites blossomed, our home lives had begun to change, albeit subtly. I realised that my wife had been right all along, we had been risking something precious in our family life, and it was time to take action.

There was a third reason: since my moving home had “enforced” a layoff from being online for all of us at home, for once I had the opportunity to observe what my children did as a result, and to continue learning from them. Seeing what they asked me to do for them online while connected at work; seeing what they went to friends’ houses to do online; seeing what they didn’t care about;  seeing what displacement activities came up, how they spent their time as a result.  If anything, everything I’d observed endorsed the call to action.

So.

The action I’ve taken is to spend less time online, to encourage my family to reduce their time as well, and to do other things together as a result; naturally, this means I will post less often. I hope to make up for the deficiency in quantity by raising the quality of my posts. I haven’t stopped thinking, or reading, or talking to people.

Apologies for the lack of warning; it was one of those things that just happened as I thought about things, something I am wont to do every now and then.