Early Interesting
Beyond Early Adopters, Can Google+ Sustain Growth?
Give credit to Google: Its strategic and orchestrated launch ofGoogle+ has been nearly flawless.
Early reviews were positive but reserved, thanks to Google’s failure with Google Buzz. Like clockwork though, technology celebrities like Robert Scoble and Kevin Rosestarting flooding Google’s social network and singing its praises. Taking a cue from Gmail, Google released invites in small bursts, sparking a clamor for invites across the web.
The result of Google’s carefully planned campaign is an estimated user base of 10 million in just two weeks. More importantly, engagement on Google+ is extremely high, with many reporting they get more responses on Google+ than they do on Twitter or Facebook. It’s clear that Google+ has momentum.
That’s nice, but the momentum is starting to blind Google+ users and the press to reality. Here’s the truth: Google+ is dominated almost entirely by early adopters. And early adopters, while important, are not great predictors of the success of a social network.
Let’s take a trip down memory lane and revisit some social media services that have been embraced by early adopters. What has happened to them and what it might mean for the future of Google+?
The Technology Adoption Lifecycle
Many of you have probably heard of the technology adoption lifecycle and Rogers’ bell curve. It is a sociological model developed in the 1950s to predict the normal distribution of technology adoption. Innovators and early adopters make up the first 16% of any given population that accepts a new technology. They are more risk-oriented, tend to be community leaders and aren’t afraid to try new things. However, that still leaves 84% of the population to adopt a new technology.
Let’s put these percentages in the context of Facebook and Google+. Zuckerberg said last week that he believes Facebook has hit critical mass. He also announced that Facebook has 750 million users. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that’s the potential market for the adoption of a social media service. If we do the math, that means that the first 120 million users are early adopters for social networking. That’s a long way from the current 10 million.
Whether you agree with my math or not, it’s clear that Google+ is dominated by an early-adopter crowd. Only early-adopter crowds could make Robert Scoble, Leo Laporte and Kevin Rose among the top ten most popular users on Google+. I even have a term for this phenomenon: The Robert Scoble Effect.
A History of Early Adoption
There’s nothing wrong with early adopters — you need them to test and evangelize your products. Every product starts with early adopters, though some start with a different crowd than others (remember, Facebook started out as a social network for college students).
However, early adopters shouldn’t be used as an indication that a technology product is destined for success. Let’s look at what has happened to a couple of technology products that either are or were once hot with the early adopter community:
FriendFeed: In 2008 and 2009, FriendFeed was all the rage. Its real-time stream and long comment threads were the precursors to the technology now standard on Facebook and Google+. The tech presswrote about it constantly, predicting that it would beat out the competition.
FriendFeed gained a cult-like following, but it never broke out into the mainstream. In 2009, Facebook acquired FriendFeed for $50 million. It was a nice exit, but with companies like Groupon and Zynga filing for IPOs that could be worth more than $20 billion, FriendFeed never turned early adopters into a mainstream audience.
Quora: At the end of last year, nobody could shut up about Quora, the social Q&A startup co-founded by former Facebook CTO Adam D’Angelo. It was in the middle of a perfect storm.
Since then, discussion of Quora has dropped off tremendously, and so has usage of the Q&A site. Follower growth has stalled since May. It also suffers from the Robert Scoble Effect, as the technology enthusiast is still Quora’s most followed user.
Let’s be clear: it’s still too early to make a final judgment on Quora, but the Q&A site is a good example of the fickleness of early adopters.
Twitter: On the other hand, Twitter is a good example of how an early adopter product can go mainstream. Twitter was dominated by early adopters for the longest time. It wasn’t until Ashton Kutcher, Oprah and Shaq joined that the social media service’s growth shot to the moon.
Now Twitter users generate more than 200 million tweets per day, and its most popular users aren’t Robert Scoble or Kevin Rose: it’s Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber and Barack Obama.
Buzz: Let’s not forget that Google launched a social product last year, one that received a ton of accolades. We all know how that turned out.
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