I think that the 80/20 rule – Pareto principle is at work again!

Wilson writes about “Active Users and Online Retailing” . He makes the case for “focus on making users active first and foremost and give them a lot of things they can do on your website beside transact. By doing that you increase the number of monthly visits and therefore the total amount of potential transactors.”

And further to Martin’s response regarding “lurkers and creators” I recall reading in Yochai Benkler’s “Wealth of Networks” about the relatively small number of people who actively contribute to Wikipedia versus the numer of readers. I can’t find the reference but in a 2005 Business Week 2005 interview with Wikiepedia founder Jimmy Wales http://snurl.com/ncul7 indicates:

“The number I like to talk about is the number of very active editors — those that do the bulk of the work. As of October, there were about 1,850 for the English version of Wikipedia, and 4,573 worldwide. We don’t know how many unique users visit the site because we’re lame and don’t keep track of it — we don’t sell advertising, so we don’t have to. But we get about 2.5 billion page views per month”

If anyone has more recent Wikipedia particpation numbers please share.

Matthew Hodgson, I am reading the Groundswell book at the moment. Fascinating reading. So, what do you think is the main difference between Twitter and FriendFeed? I use a FriendFeed widget on my EGO blog, collecting different streams (blog posts, Twitter tweets, FriendFeed messages, Tumblr posts, etc.) into one lifestream.