UsageWatch.org

The SpreadFirefox campaign
Since the launch of version 1.0, the 9th of November, efforts to promote Firefox and foster its adoption beyond the web developers community have multiplied. The community-based SpreadFirefox campaign has grown to 25.000 volunteer marketers, has banners and promotional buttons advertising Firefox on around 100.000 web sites and significant coverage in blogosphere, as well as in the more traditional medias. The most spectacular action has been to collect 250.000$ from the community in response to the invitation to donate money to finance a full-page ad on the New York Times. And the SpreadFirefox community is working on the layout and wording of the page itself.

Spectacular adoption rate
In these first days, the community-based SpreadFirefox campaign has had some spectacular results. As of today, November the 19th, Firefox has been downloaded over 4.5 M times (see counters on SpreadFirefox web site). Reports from webmasters of web professionals’ sites indicate that the number of visitors using Firefox browser is on the rise, overtaking in some cases IE. Web Analystics firm WebSideStory (via LinuxInsider) has witnessed a decrease in the number of US users using IE to view the sites it analyses: they were 95.5% in June, 93.7% in September, 92.9% at the end of October; and a gradual increase in the number of Firefox users, that it estimates to be at 3%. A very rough projection, using the Computer Industry Almanc figure of 185 M US Internet Users, would put the number of Firefox users at approximately 5.5 M.

Will this spectacular adoption rate of about 500.000 new Firefox users per day continue? And for how long?

These are obviously very difficult questions to answer. What is certain is that, for this trend to continue, Firefox has to grow beyond its technical home base and engage the larger community of Internet users. The Mozilla Foundations is very much aware of that as this quote from Mitchel Barker, Mozilla Foundation's president, clearly indicates: "our entire start page is new, and that reflects our ongoing goal of appealing to the general consumer market". 

The browser market is saturated, every PC has a browser; it is dominated by one product, Internet Explorer; web services and web sites are built and designed for the dominant browser and most Internet users seem to be relatively happy with IE. Certainly, IE's limitations are known and no significant new developments are in view, while Firefox represents real progress and innovation not only because of its features and of its development processes, but also for what it represents as a collective achievement by the open software community.

Will these arguments be enough to engender a strong uptake by the majority of pragmatic Internet users? In this respect, are the SpreadFirefox initiatives rightly targeted?

My feeling is that the campaign should make a larger effort to support more virality, in the sense of more direct - personalised - one-to-one sharing between Firefox users and their friends and relations. This form of virality is a necessary complement to more traditional mass media communication which diffuses more impersonal, generic representations about Firefox. Ideally, Firefox users should be in the position to give their friends a tangible proof of how Firefox use empowers them, just like it happened when people sent their friends and relations an email using HotMail or with a PayPal payment. These emails had the advantage of presenting the service in context - HotMail in the context of an email conversation; PayPal in the context of an economic transaction. At the same time, they created awareness, interpretation, and even more importantly a situation that favours identification and invites imitation. In this direct form virality bridges the gap between being exposed and trying out a new service, at a degree that is unreachable by mass media communication. Firefox is an experience, and a friend's experience of it provides one of the best possible proofs.

Assuming that this approach makes sense, how could it be implemented?
A signature, however nice, at the end of the message remains external to the main context. It is in fact the text of the message itself, plus surrounding information like the address used, the object or the time the message was sent that create the context. If the signature appeared on a webmail, there would at least be the minimal context of the browser, but not everybody is even aware of that. The best idea that comes to my mind is a personal email sent to friends that contains a link to an interesting page that should be viewed using Firefox. But I'm not sure that is such a good idea. 

One of the first things to know when trying to understand the social construction of the networked homes is how many households have set up a connection to the Internet, and among them how many have chosen to have a potentially always-on high-speed connection. The presence of such a connection is a clear indication that the household is engaged in the Information society as an active node of network.

However, even what looks like a simple question, e.g. what is the number of Internet homes as of November 2004, is in fact quite difficult to answer. To simplify things, I looked first at the US situation only.

How many US homes are connected to the Internet? And with which type of connection?

The number I came up with is that nearly 70 M US households are connected to the Internet; and somewhere between 25 and 30 M have Broadband access.

Here is how I came to that estimation. I used two kinds of data:

• Survey data, the number of households with active Internet access, further decomposed in narrow or broadband connections

• Business reports, the number of ISP subscribers to broadband connections. Notice that these numbers refer both to residential and small business subscriptions, and to Cable and DSL connections.

According to the US Census, in 2003 there were 111.3 M households in the US. At the end of the same year, market analyst eMarketer put the total number of online household at 68.3 M (eMarketer, November 2004) corresponding to an adoption rate of circa 61%. Of the 68.3 M Internet households, 24.8 M (36%) had a broadband connection. Similar estimations come from JD Power and associates' Internet Service Provider Residential Customer Satisfaction Study (TM). The study indicates that household Internet penetration is stabilizing at 66%, corresponding to a yearly growth of 2%. Broadband connections account for 39% of all Internet connections, what represents a 13% increase in a year.

Looking at the number of subscribers to broadband connections, the FCC indicates that there were 26 M broadband lines in service at the end of December 2003 (FCC, June 2004). This number however includes homes and small businesses. More recent estimates, that again don't distinguish between households and businesses, put the number of broadband subscribers at about 30 M. Quoting LRG eMarketer reports that the twenty largest cable and DSL providers in the US, accounting for about 95% of the market, have 30.9 million broadband Internet subscribers (LRG, 10th November); while the DSL Forum indicates that the total number of subscribers is 29.186 M (DSL Forum, 30th June).

The same fluctuation characterizes the statistics about the number of home Internet users who have broadband connections. They vary between 48 M and 65M. The Digital Future report and Nielsen//NetRatings converge to put the number of broadband home users at between 64 M (Nielsen//NetRatings, August 2004) and 65 M (Digital Future Report, December 2003). The Pew Internet Project makes a lower estimation at 48 M broadband adult home users. (Pew Internet Project, March 2004). Assuming that on average there are two Internet users per household, the estimation fluctuates again in a similar range of between 24 and 32 M households.

Where: US
When: December 2003 - September 2004

It's been now more than twenty years that "ordinary" people have had Personal Computers at home, and about eight years that they have connected them to the Internet. A very significant portion of leisure time has been spent gaming on the PC; writing and distributing text; looking at, and editing, digital pictures and videos; listening to stored or streamed music and radio; exchanging music and videos; planning travels; learning; practising hobbies. Also a large part of the social and civic life has gradually relied on the connected PC. People keep in touch with family, friends and community by e-mail, IM or web blogs and sites. Political participation, relationship with the administration, financial and insurance management have also been moved to the Internet. Over the years, more digital technologies have been connected to the home PC: printers, scanners, more PCs, wired networks, digital cameras, digital music recorders and players, DVD. And the digital technologization of the home is still very much in progress: more recent entries are DVRs, wireless networks, VoIP and Media stations.

However, if we were to listen to industry press releases, technology analysts, journalists commentators, and innovators, we would be led to believe that most homes are networked or soon will (in the most developed countries) and that residents of these homes are passive consumers who use the technologies that are marketed to them in the way designers meant them to be used. In reality, the process of «technically» networking the home and of «socially» inhabiting it is largely more complex and highly intertwined. 

One the threads I'm follolling is the analysis of innovation in the domestic sphere. My objective is to qualify what "inhabiting networked homes" means as of November 2004. I approach the issue from an adoption perspective, trying to answer the questions "How many homes are networked homes?" and "How networked are they?" proposing a taxonomy of networked homes. Whenever research exists, I complement the adoption analysis with a usage perspective that tries to characterise the way people actually use the technologies. The underlying assumption is that adoption and usage best reflect the meaning that these innovations have acquired for people.

What could an operational definition of what a "networked home" is be?
A networked home is a household who has adopted the Internet as one of the mediators of many of its everyday activities. In terms of equipment, its basic configuration consists of at least a PC and an Internet connection. More advanced configurations include a broadband Internet connection and a home network, potentially wireless, connecting two or more PCs. In terms of usage, the networked home mediates typical household activities, such as fostering social relations; research; planning and preparing trips or purchases; managing finances and administration; leisure time alone and together. The level of equipment and the type of usage patterns are highly correlated, with greater intensity of Internet use in household with broadband Internet access.

Further support for estimating overall DVR adoption rate at around 4% of US households comes from Nielsen via ITfacts. More interestingly, however, Nielsen, quoted by MediaPost notes that "in some markets - Las Vegas, San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Austin and other "Western "markets - it's pushing 10%". These markets incidentally correspond pretty much to high density Creative Class areas. Empowering technologies, like DVRs, may couple particularly well with the Creative Class lifestyle.

Where: US
When: November 2004 (public statement)