The trick you want to accomplish is that when one person is using your software, it suddenly provides value to that person and their entire circle of friends, without the friends having had to do anything at all. Then, later, you pull the friends into the fold: if one of them starts using the software, they become their own hub, and get the benefit they have already witnessed from a distance.
This is the gist of what Jonathan Grudin has been saying since the early 90's, best crystallized in a 1994 article in Communications of the ACM, "Groupware and social dynamics: Eight challenges for developers." Subsequent case studies, such as in calendar application adoption, show that for adoption there have to be benefits for the person putting in the effort of entering data (not just the manager, duh!), and when enough people use an application there is a kind of peer pressure and envy making the holdouts finally jump in, too.
But, like, who reads CACM or conference proceedings these days?
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Date: 2005-02-16 07:19 am (UTC)"those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it ..."
Date: 2005-02-16 01:07 pm (UTC)This is the gist of what Jonathan Grudin has been saying since the early 90's, best crystallized in a 1994 article in Communications of the ACM, "Groupware and social dynamics: Eight challenges for developers." Subsequent case studies, such as in calendar application adoption, show that for adoption there have to be benefits for the person putting in the effort of entering data (not just the manager, duh!), and when enough people use an application there is a kind of peer pressure and envy making the holdouts finally jump in, too.
But, like, who reads CACM or conference proceedings these days?