4 ms·

I found the noted acceleration in time to 50 million users to be very interesting: radio 38y telephone 20y tv 13y cellphone 12y

I found the noted acceleration in time to 50 million users to be very interesting: radio 38y telephone 20y tv 13y cellphone 12y internet 4y ipod 3y myspace 2.5y facebook 2y youtube 1y angry birds 35d

ashark 10y ago
I wonder what they'd look like if you changed the target to a percentage of global population. Moving target, so it'd be harder to figure out, but say time to 5% or similar. It'd surely make the numbers less dramatic.
- jerf 10y ago
  From 38 years to Angry Birds is 2.6 orders of magnitude. Population has increased by a lot less than that since radio. It's close to 400, so a radio population of one billion would have to be 400+ billion today to scale linearly. You are correct that it would be somewhat less dramatic, but it would still be impressively dramatic. I'm just doing some Fermi estimates here to give a sense of what sort of change we'd get in reaction to your idea in the spirit of fun, not anger, because I enjoy this sort of thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem
  - ashark 10y ago
    As pointed out in the notes the Angry Birds entry is a bit of a non sequitur since that's more like measuring how fast a given new TV show's viewership increased after TVs were already extremely common, and it's not exactly a world-changing technology like most of the other things on the list. It's not comparable to the other things, and was probably included for effect rather than its belonging on the list by shared criteria with the other items. I expect the others would look far less dramatic as a percentage—I'd guess the 12-year cell phone number and the 38-year radio number especially would move far closer together if percentages rather than an absolute count were used. TV/cell phone might well reverse, since they're already so close. The table sets off some serious "lying with numbers" warning bells.
tzs 10y ago
I assume these are meant to be ordered by year of introduction? If so, shouldn't telephone be ahead of radio? Also, according to this site [1] it took telephone 75 years to reach 50 million. Several other sites agree, such as [2] and [3]. [1] https://www.techworm.net/2015/03/to-reach-50-million-users-telephone-took-75-years-internet-took-4-years-angry-birds-took-only-35-days.html https://www.techworm.net/2015/03/to-reach-50-million-users-t... [2] http://www.businessinsider.com/it-took-75-years-for-the-telephone-to-reach-100-million-users-and-it-took-candy-crush-15-months http://www.businessinsider.com/it-took-75-years-for-the-tele... [3] https://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2015/03/13/it-took-the-telephone-75-years-to-do-what-angry-birds-did-in-35-days-but-what-does-that-mean/ https://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2015/03/13/it-took-the-telep...
cma 10y ago
Internet wasn't 4 years to 50 million. It had a long history before that. And if they just mean the web, it didn't have images at first, so why not time it off of Gopher or earlier protocols? That entry just looks massaged to fit a pattern. It would be like taking TV and baselining it's growth off of when second NTSC standard took effect.
- sanswork 10y ago
  Counting the years before it was available to the general public seems unfair.
vkou 10y ago
Myspace, facebook, youtube, and angry birds numbers are disingenuous. If television hit 100 million viewers, but only had one channel... And I create a second television channel, I'd hit 50 million viewers overnight. Yet, I did not create anything quantifiably different. People uploaded and shared videos before Youtube was a thing, and used social networks (forums) before Facebook or Myspace were a thing. People played mobile games before Angry Birds. The problem was that the other solutions weren't as good.
pavement 10y ago
Really? Because I find it to be cherry-picked junk science. The examples seem selected in favor of the numeric pattern they best serve. 1. tv, radio: passive adoption, buy them and turn them on. the end user consumes cheaply and effortlessly, with minimal barriers to adoption. 2. telephone, cellphone: one habituates and bootstraps the other. this technology's adoption rate is the only meaningful pair of members on the list, due to the premise of the network effect of peering with fellow users. cellphones are a redundancy, with really only service provider adoption and promotion factoring into the rate of expansion. users are throttled by carrier capacity and tower coverage, not unlike copper plant expansion with land lines. 3. ipod: most egregious example of cherry-picking. flouts predecessor technologies. what about mini-disc players? what about the diamond rio MP3 players? compact discs, audio cassetes, 8 tracks all affect the demand curve of the ipod, and yet such statistics are selectively ignored. why? because they aren't useful accomplices to the desired narrative. 4. internet: facilitates several other members on the list, for which adoption becomes implicit, based on habituation to the internet. piggy-backed on existing infrastructure, adoption is partly behavioral, in that once the transmission protocols are established, adoption is very nearly reduced to buying a device, plugging into phone or tv infrastructure, and typing instead of talking. one could reduce consumer participation down to the level of TTY advances, since much of the rest is virtual and software oriented. 5. facebook, myspace, youtube: nigh-indistinguishable examples. very nearly non-examples. web sites:internet::tv shows:television. why not include tv viewing habits with tech adoption statistics? how do "I Love Lucy", "Leave It To Beaver" and "The Honeymooners" factor in with tech adoption. Are national television networks classified as individual articles of technology? ABC, CBS and NBC are empires that each command their own pool of proprietary technologies, clustered around a delivery apparatus and network of affiliates. Should the expansion of an empire be redefined to fit in with the adoption of a new discovery? 6. angry birds: a non-event, with regard to tech adoption. what about nintendo, and why not other specific examples of video games? did we chart the adoption of "Altered Beast" or "Doom" or "Mike Tyson's Punch Out"? some of those likely matched "Angry Birds" in a single christmas season. Content does not represent new technology by default. Angry Birds is not a novel technology for it's platform. It is a media template that has existed since before QBASIC GORILLAS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorillas_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorillas_(video_game) In this respect, Angry Birds represents technology that had ALREADY BEEN ADOPTED DECADES EARLIER BY MILLIONS. It does not belong on the list any more than Cousin Larry and Balki Bartokomous belong on the list due to the rapid adoption rate of the "technology" known as "Perfect Strangers" in 1986. That list is a joke, and threatens the credibility of the entire article.

I found the noted acceleration in time to 50 million users to be very interesting: radio 38y telephone 20y tv 13y cellphone 12y internet 4y ipod 3y myspace 2.5y facebook 2y youtube 1y angry birds 35d

ashark 10y ago

I wonder what they'd look like if you changed the target to a percentage of global population. Moving target, so it'd be harder to figure out, but say time to 5% or similar. It'd surely make the numbers less dramatic.

jerf 10y ago
From 38 years to Angry Birds is 2.6 orders of magnitude. Population has increased by a lot less than that since radio. It's close to 400, so a radio population of one billion would have to be 400+ billion today to scale linearly. You are correct that it would be somewhat less dramatic, but it would still be impressively dramatic. I'm just doing some Fermi estimates here to give a sense of what sort of change we'd get in reaction to your idea in the spirit of fun, not anger, because I enjoy this sort of thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem
- ashark 10y ago
  As pointed out in the notes the Angry Birds entry is a bit of a non sequitur since that's more like measuring how fast a given new TV show's viewership increased after TVs were already extremely common, and it's not exactly a world-changing technology like most of the other things on the list. It's not comparable to the other things, and was probably included for effect rather than its belonging on the list by shared criteria with the other items. I expect the others would look far less dramatic as a percentage—I'd guess the 12-year cell phone number and the 38-year radio number especially would move far closer together if percentages rather than an absolute count were used. TV/cell phone might well reverse, since they're already so close. The table sets off some serious "lying with numbers" warning bells.

tzs 10y ago

I assume these are meant to be ordered by year of introduction? If so, shouldn't telephone be ahead of radio? Also, according to this site [1] it took telephone 75 years to reach 50 million. Several other sites agree, such as [2] and [3]. [1] https://www.techworm.net/2015/03/to-reach-50-million-users-telephone-took-75-years-internet-took-4-years-angry-birds-took-only-35-days.html https://www.techworm.net/2015/03/to-reach-50-million-users-t... [2] http://www.businessinsider.com/it-took-75-years-for-the-telephone-to-reach-100-million-users-and-it-took-candy-crush-15-months http://www.businessinsider.com/it-took-75-years-for-the-tele... [3] https://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2015/03/13/it-took-the-telephone-75-years-to-do-what-angry-birds-did-in-35-days-but-what-does-that-mean/ https://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2015/03/13/it-took-the-telep...

cma 10y ago

Internet wasn't 4 years to 50 million. It had a long history before that. And if they just mean the web, it didn't have images at first, so why not time it off of Gopher or earlier protocols? That entry just looks massaged to fit a pattern. It would be like taking TV and baselining it's growth off of when second NTSC standard took effect.

sanswork 10y ago
Counting the years before it was available to the general public seems unfair.

vkou 10y ago

Myspace, facebook, youtube, and angry birds numbers are disingenuous. If television hit 100 million viewers, but only had one channel... And I create a second television channel, I'd hit 50 million viewers overnight. Yet, I did not create anything quantifiably different. People uploaded and shared videos before Youtube was a thing, and used social networks (forums) before Facebook or Myspace were a thing. People played mobile games before Angry Birds. The problem was that the other solutions weren't as good.

pavement 10y ago

Really? Because I find it to be cherry-picked junk science. The examples seem selected in favor of the numeric pattern they best serve. 1. tv, radio: passive adoption, buy them and turn them on. the end user consumes cheaply and effortlessly, with minimal barriers to adoption. 2. telephone, cellphone: one habituates and bootstraps the other. this technology's adoption rate is the only meaningful pair of members on the list, due to the premise of the network effect of peering with fellow users. cellphones are a redundancy, with really only service provider adoption and promotion factoring into the rate of expansion. users are throttled by carrier capacity and tower coverage, not unlike copper plant expansion with land lines. 3. ipod: most egregious example of cherry-picking. flouts predecessor technologies. what about mini-disc players? what about the diamond rio MP3 players? compact discs, audio cassetes, 8 tracks all affect the demand curve of the ipod, and yet such statistics are selectively ignored. why? because they aren't useful accomplices to the desired narrative. 4. internet: facilitates several other members on the list, for which adoption becomes implicit, based on habituation to the internet. piggy-backed on existing infrastructure, adoption is partly behavioral, in that once the transmission protocols are established, adoption is very nearly reduced to buying a device, plugging into phone or tv infrastructure, and typing instead of talking. one could reduce consumer participation down to the level of TTY advances, since much of the rest is virtual and software oriented. 5. facebook, myspace, youtube: nigh-indistinguishable examples. very nearly non-examples. web sites:internet::tv shows:television. why not include tv viewing habits with tech adoption statistics? how do "I Love Lucy", "Leave It To Beaver" and "The Honeymooners" factor in with tech adoption. Are national television networks classified as individual articles of technology? ABC, CBS and NBC are empires that each command their own pool of proprietary technologies, clustered around a delivery apparatus and network of affiliates. Should the expansion of an empire be redefined to fit in with the adoption of a new discovery? 6. angry birds: a non-event, with regard to tech adoption. what about nintendo, and why not other specific examples of video games? did we chart the adoption of "Altered Beast" or "Doom" or "Mike Tyson's Punch Out"? some of those likely matched "Angry Birds" in a single christmas season. Content does not represent new technology by default. Angry Birds is not a novel technology for it's platform. It is a media template that has existed since before QBASIC GORILLAS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorillas_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorillas_(video_game) In this respect, Angry Birds represents technology that had ALREADY BEEN ADOPTED DECADES EARLIER BY MILLIONS. It does not belong on the list any more than Cousin Larry and Balki Bartokomous belong on the list due to the rapid adoption rate of the "technology" known as "Perfect Strangers" in 1986. That list is a joke, and threatens the credibility of the entire article.