Why Things Become Unpopular | Hacker News Reader

Why Things Become Unpopular

physorg.com

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Test it yourself

http://www.babynamewizard.com/voyager

I think the next bubble to burst is any name starting with QU

http://www.babynamewizard.com/voyager#prefix=QU&ms=false...

...just like happened to the letter "D" back in the 1950s

http://www.babynamewizard.com/voyager#prefix=D&ms=false&...

Also, I don't like where this is going. Just getting started with the parabola,

http://google.com/trends?q=4chan&ctab=0&geo=all&...

Explain this: http://google.com/trends?q=uggs&ctab=0&geo=all&d...

Since uggs is a winterboot it's pretty obvious that it will be searched for in winter time. If you take this into account the graph shows a slow and steady increase in uggs searches.

Interestingly it seems that uggs are more popular in the northern hemisphere since there are not a lot of searches in what is the northern hemispheres summer and the southern hemispheres winter.

Accorindg to the theory they should have a good chance at making a valuable brand, since their growth is slow but has been increasing over the last four years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ugg_boots

There are also a lot more humans in the northern hemisphere.

Will it explain this? -- http://google.com/trends?q=twitter

Yes, and it isn't good news for twitter ;-)

Don't Google Trends show search trends? Surely in the beginning people google for twitter, but later they just go to twitter.com directly?

This seems to be extrapolating a lot from the original results. The study was done only on baby names. When you name a person, you have to consider the effect it will have on the person's whole life. So it makes sense to avoid names that are trendy. They'll sound stupid 50 years from now. I don't think people evaluate social networks or other products the same way.

I'm also confused by their own summary: "According to the results, the quicker a cultural item rockets to popularity, the quicker it dies. This pattern occurs because people believe that items that are adopted quickly will become fads, leading them to avoid these items, thus causing these items to die out."

That seems to me to describe the psychology of non-adopters, not peak adopters who drop the service/item quickly.

Yes, and they are also assuming that sudden popularity causes the sudden unpopularity. If the trend they describe is true and common, it might be because the large number of people who follow fads quickly don't stick with them for long, while things of real quality take longer to be accepted, but are worth keeping around. Therefore, the conclusion and advice should be to make a high-quality product.

So what does this mean for, say, Twitter or the iPhone?

Well in the 90's everyone adopted the internet quickly but it hasn't died yet. So I guess there are trends and stable products.

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