In 2006 I started using this graphic to explain social scaling and functionality around social tagging systems (then the x-axis was “times an object tagged”), as it helped bring to light the reality of what was to come from use. But increasingly I also used it to explain general social software maturation that echoed social software development work I was doing in 2002 and even patterns seen many years earlier in my work with social software.
As the number of people using a service increases ov...