Whenever people ask me: And how are you going to drive adoption of Mine!? My answer is: by not driving it… but by tapping into the kind of things people already do and are used to doing more and more. So a conclusion from a McKinsey article by Scott Griffith, CEO of Zipcar, describing how web and communications technologies gave rise to his company’s innovative business model, resonated with me:

Despite the advances that Zipcar has been able to make by leveraging technology, none of this would be relevant without the preexisting level of comfort with and use of technology by consumers and businesses. People are ready to try a self-serve car because they have become comfortable with self-service banking and self-serve checkouts. I doubt people would be comfortable reserving and paying for the use of a car on the Web if they hadn’t already done similar e-commerce transactions, like having DVDs delivered by Netflix or buying an airline ticket online that allows them to check in at a self-service kiosk. And when it comes to FastFleet, I doubt whether businesses and governments would consider outsourcing fleet-management systems if they hadn’t already outsourced e-mail, Web hosting, and other mission-critical applications.

So we are designing for the few who needs Mine!, not the ‘most people’, ‘my granny’, ‘the great unwashed’, ‘demographic of your choice’. That starts with me – I want it, I need it, I can’t wait to use it. Preferrably by yesterday! Along the way, a few other people have seen the point and want the same. If all of them start using Mine! for their purposes and it works for them, it’s a success, because their use will improve it for the next level of users who don’t need to understand or subscribe to the whole vision and philosophical underpinnings of the Mine! project. Lather, rinse, repeat.

I prefer to think of adoption as something that happens from an epicenter in a style of a heatwave or, more gently, a stone dropped into water. In networks, this works much better than driven adoption that often misses its target.

Heatwave

cross-posted from the Mine! project blog

• Thought police muscle up in Britain | The Australian
  (tags: britain politics society totalitarianism intolerance thought_crime)
• Musing about downloads in the UK – confused of calcutta
  (tags: copyright filesharing ISP downloads politics musicindustry FAIL)

• Damn Cool Pics: Fail Humor
  (tags: FAIL funny photos)
• Space Views Blog
  (tags: universe space nature pictures)

• Twitter vs. the Dunbar Number, and the Rise of Weak Ties | whatsupnah…
  interesting analysis, using network research about goodness of weak ties. worth reading
  (tags: dunbar_number socialnetworks weak_ties network_theory)
• 2009 Technorati State of the Blogosphere Report – key findings. | Online Journalism Blog
  mildly interesting
  (tags: blogosphere metrics report technorati)
• Social Media Legal Review – thinkdifferenthealth
  excrutiating, funny and too true.
  (tags: socialmedia nalts funny legal business video healthcare)
• What physicists want to know – Boing Boing
  Annotated link www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.boingboing.net%2F2009%2F10%2F26%2Fwhat-physicists-want.html
  (tags: boingboing quantum physics complexity reality universe)

• What Startups Are Really Like
  useful article for startups but also for anyone working on something that they want to succeed
  (tags: startups success VC paulgraham)

• ProjectVRM Blog » How VRM Helps CRM
  Annotated link www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fblogs.law.harvard.edu%2Fvrm%2F2009%2F10%2F09%2Fhow-vrm-helps-crm
  (tags: projectvrm vrm crm silo workshop)
• OneLiners – Social Web XG Wiki
  (tags: dataportability projects data web technologies identity)

Yesterday I attended a meeting called a mashup* event – private Digital Identity Roundtable, organised by the indefatiguable Tony Fish – whose book My Digital Footprint also came out yesterday.

The conversation was varied and under Chatham House rules so can’t talk about it in detail. What I can repeat here is my closing remark – a result of pervasive assumption that there should be identity provider(s) and my data doesn’t need to be mine:

I want to own and drive, manage, share my identity.
I want to do that on my own terms, using technology that enables me rather than provides for me.
I want to be my own ‘identity provider’ and I’d rather address challenges that this would pose than shoe-horn notions and practices of offline identity management onto the online networked world.

There you go, I said it. Here I try to work on it.

• 20 Hilarious Twitter Comic Strips | Penn Olson
  (tags: twitter comic humour funny)
• Google Wave Add-on for Firefox at That Smith
  (tags: Googlewave notified application firefox)
• The Talent Innovation Imperative
  Annotated link www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.strategy-business.com%2Farticle%2F09304%3Fpg%3Dall
  (tags: no_tag)

• Op-Ed Contributor – Rights Watchdog, Lost in the Mideast – NYTimes.com
  wow, that's almost courageous thing to say given how many 'liberals' will want to tear him to pieces. will be fun to watch.
  (tags: NYT human rights watch israel middleeast criticism)
• 0870 iPhone app has saved callers more than £267,000
  (tags: 0870 android application save download iphone VRM)
• Bruce Sterling – reboot 11 closing talk – reboot video
  closing speech at 2009 reboot
  (tags: reboot sterling technology future video)
• McKinsey: What Matters: Will people pay for content online?
  (tags: mckinsey clayshirky publishing payment audience journalism distribution online)

• Tesco data – the response « Consumer Focus Labs
  this is much worse than i though it would be! Annotated link www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.consumerfocuslabs.org%2Fdatablog%2Ftesco-data-the-response
  (tags: tesco MINT dataprotection retail purchase_history CFL)

• Technology Review: China Cracks Down on Tor Anonymity Network
  Tor, one of the most effective proxy services have been blocked by the chinese government. Fortunately, there are other ways of distributing the access to the service. It's an arms race in a continuing war.
  (tags: anonymity china government censorship totalitarianism)
• A Personal Account On Getting Deeply Involved With Apache
  (tags: apache personal opensource mineproject community code hackers)

• Apple – Movie Trailers – The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
  want to see!
  (tags: imaginarium movie Mine!)

Adriana Lukas

Adriana Lukas

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