There is a big movement to make mainstream Web 2.0 technologies! I have seen dozens of articles recently talking about the main-streaming of Web 2.0. For example, Adweek points to research done by Avenue A/Razorfish that shows some “Web 2.0 staples” such as video sharing have gone mainstream. The article mentions that 17 percent of users shared bookmarks through social bookmarking sites. What was interesting was the fact that more mature Web 2.0 technologies have higher adoption: 85 percent used “most e-mailed/most popular stories” links, 60 percent personalized their home pages and nearly the same number of users subscribed to RSS feeds. Blogs also proved very popular with 61 percent of those surveyed saying they read blogs at least on a weekly basis.

What is interesting about Grouptivity is that we are taking a rather mainstream technology (“Email a Friend”) and moving it into the real of Web 2.0 as I pointed out in my post title Email a Friend 2.0. Grouptivity is doing this by building a “social network” around shared content (which is really what email a friend or forward to a friend is) by enabling community and discussion around each piece of content that a user shares, either privately (with a group of friends, family or co-workers) or publicly! The fact that more mature technologies have higher adoption rates, as the Adweek article points, definitely plays in our favor and Grouptivity users get the intuitive functionality of an “Email a Friend” button along with the rich sharing environment and other social media feature that Web 2.0 has to offer!