Ghost of Midnight

Riding the adoption bell curve

A posting on TechCrunch came with this nifty illustration about adoption of new online services the other day…

… customers and word-of-mouth referrals travel from left to right along a bell curve that starts with Innovators and Early Adopters, peaks with the Early Majority and the Late Majority, and finally permeates with reaction from Laggards.

If I read this right, the author is claiming that Digg and Twitter have about 16% market penetration.  In a previous posting here, it was noted that Digg has 30 million monthly visitors, with 3 million of them registered users.  Considering just the U.S. population (300 million), wouldn’t that put Digg between 1% and 10% penetration?  That is, still far from moving out of the Early Adopter range?

Nearly 20% of our pilot area subscribes to Front Porch Forum, including 33% of Burlington and better than 90% of our leading neighborhoods.  That puts the bulk of our service in the Early Majority area, with our best neighborhoods pushing through the Late Majority and into the Laggards.