Counting to three as a self-imposed barrier to early adoption

I am an early adopter by nature, I love to try out new stuff. The web is awash with exciting new services but I have found a need to protect myself and my productivity by not trying out everything I hear about. I do that by using the rule of three: Only the third time somebody I trust recommends a particular service will I go forth and sign up.

Some of the things that I in turn recommend to my friends went through this process, I didn't take it up until the products were at relative maturity: I only switched to using Google search instead of Alltheweb in 2000, held my first auction on eBay only in 2000, didn't start blogging until 2004, only started sharing photos on flickr in the beginning of 2005, waited until 2006 until getting my first Mac, didn't have an avatar in Second Life until 2006, only took to Twitter in December last year and only started using Amazon S3 very recently.

Of course, there are also exceptions where I started using a new tool the moment I heard about it. Some of them are: Parallels (2006), Mind Manager (2005), Gmail, Wikipedia (both in 2004), Groove (don't even remember when, probably last century).

I am still waiting to count to three with regards to Myspace, World of Warcraft, Ning, Mybloglog and others.

As the tools we use become increasingly social, network effects do not infer a lot of benefits to early adopters. Paypal knew it and coaxed early adoption by offering cash for signing up (a $10 discount is still a very popular way to encourage take up). In the future we will see ever more creative ways of seeding membership to make services useful; hyped up closed beta tests is the latest craze. Of course, a good practice is always to make it easy to join by making it easy to leave (taking your data with you).

Tags: adoption early adopter Google Alltheweb eBay flickr Apple Second Life Twitter Amazon S3 Parallels MindJet Wikipedia Groove make it easy to leave $10 bonus

Comments

[Lloyd Davis]

And while in confessional mode, don't forget that it took you until last week to take part in a podcast :)

[Lars Plougmann]

Thanks for pointing that out.

I can now increase the count on podcasting by 1.