There are a ton of great applications out there on the Internet, and many of them have ostensibly the same purpose. Whether they’re social networks, microblogging applications, or email clients, the number of applications far outstrips the number of types of application.
This is not at all unique to the Internet, and is an incredibly positive thing. It fosters competition, the survival of the fittest, and a constant bettering of the product. There’s a push back on this innovation, though, created by people’s resistance to changing their routines.
I may or may not be coining a term here, but I call it “appnertia.”
Appnertia refers to users’ unwillingness to switch applications online, even when there’s a better alternative out there. We tend to choose one and stick to it, regardless of whether or not it’s actually the best of its kind. This phenomenon, though it exists anywhere, is particularly difficult to overcome on the Web, for a simple reason: the usefulness of an application is typically determined by the number of people using it.
In a Web 2.0 world, in which user interaction is the driving force behind the success of a product, numbers change everything. If no one uses an application, it’s useless. With a cell phone, whether or not others use the same model as me doesn’t affect my experience with the phone. Online, though, my experience is fundamentally reliant on the experience of others. This creates an incentive to ignore the potential of a product, and stick with the established, popular choice, even when it’s inferior.
Take Twitter and Friendfeed, one of my favorite examples of this phenomenon. In my opinion, Friendfeed is far better than Twitter. It offers more features, a better interface, a more reliable product, and is simply a better application. I’m sure many disagree, and please tell me in the comments, but that in itself is just an illustration of a bigger phenomenon. I use Twitter for no other reason than because so many others use it. Everyone I know is on it, and it’s a larger and more robust userbase to connect and interact with. It’s an inferior product, made superior by the numbers involved.
Here’s why appnertia could be a problem: it has the potential to squash incremental innovation. Adding a feature, improving an interface or making a product more reliable isn’t going to drive users to a particular application, because one user will only move when all the others do. At its core, it’s a collective action problem: no one wants to be the first to move, and without some moving none will.
There are, of course, examples that run counter to this point- Google, Facebook, and others have shifted users from an established base. Each of these did it, though, by creating such a monumentally better product (than AOL or MySpace, respectively) that they were able to drive a mass exodus to their product.
Friendfeed will never be as big as Twitter. Though it’s better, it’s not better enough to convince people to make the change. When everyone made the change, it would get better and better, and no one would look back. But without a way to mobilize the masses, and promote a product that is not only superior, but hugely different, there’s no way to convince people to move.
That, compounded by the mass inertia that’s created by the usefulness of an application being dictated by the number of users involved with it, means that it’s better to be first than to be best. People flock to the first decent entry into a particular market, and then are reluctant to leave the crowd. Not only is it groupthink, it’s logical groupthink. If no one else switches, it’s not in my best interest to do so.
How do we solve this? How do we make sure that we’re using the best application, in a time when numbers dictate what’s “best” as much as the quality of the applications themselves? What do you think about any of this? And how does it affect how we use technology?
