While Web 2.0 applications like Flickr, SlideShare, MySpace, and Second Life provide great examples of large scale deployments, we seem to have a shortage of Enterprise mass adoptions. Mass adoption would be where a large percentage of employees, contractors and business partners access the social application in their day to day work. To put this in perspective, Wikipedia is updated by only 1% of the user base actually updates information. In January 2007, the site registered 42.8 million unique visitors while only 75,000 registered contributors. Another way of looking at it is that the Wikipedia server infrastructure handles 200 million queries while handling around a million updates. Do not misunderstand, this is very impressive but with those numbers within a corporation, what happens? To keep the math simple, let us assume that we have 100,000 employees. Based on the Wikipedia numbers, we might expect to have 1,000 people updating content. Of course, that would only be in a perfect world. The actual number may only be around 100. Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia says that instead of the hundreds of thousands of people we might imagine contributing information to the site, it’s actually written by just a few hundred people, known as "super-contributors. Jacob Nielson remarked User participation often more or less follows a 90-9-1 rule: 90% of users are lurkers (i.e., read or observe, but don’t contribute); 9% of users contribute from time to time, but other priorities dominate their time; 1% of users participate a lot and account for most contributions: it can seem as if they don’t have lives because they often post just minutes after whatever event they’re commenting on occurs.

So what constitutes mass adoption? Can we say that 100 contributing users defines an environment of mass adoption? Perhaps we can separate the content from the usage and only attach the mass adoption class to the usage side. That seems to be limiting to me but I have been wrong before.