Future research

Interesting follow-up research would be a more comprehensive study of the ways in which successful hypertext applications have so far overcome critical mass. A more rigorous approach, which would likely enable us to identify the relative importance of the various factors, would be to match the historic growth-patterns as derived from server-logs to a mathematical simulation of the appearance of critical mass. And making comparisons between types of applications, such as forums, wikis and mailing-lists offers another promising branch of research.

Finally, as most collaborative web-applications so far have failed due to problems with critical mass, a better understanding of critical mass is most valuable, it is the key to unleashing the latent potential of the internet.