--- title: Wake Up To The Long Tail of Passion and Plug-Ins date: 2005-03-09T18:38:19Z modified: 2005-03-09T18:38:19Z permalink: "https://redmonk.com/jgovernor/wake-up-to-the-long-tail-of-passion-and-plug-ins/" type: post status: publish excerpt: "" wpid: 161 categories: - Uncategorized timestamp: 2005-03-09T18:38:19Z tags: - Uncategorized --- More great stuff from [Kathy Sierra](http://today.java.net/pub/au/132) over at [Creating Passionate Users](http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2005/03/whats_in_your_w.html). The notion is that a product creates a “wake”, like a boat. This wake is a wave in its own right, which can be enhanced, you can speed up the boat, swing from side to side, give the waterskier a more interesting ride. > Does your product or service support plug-ins and add-ons? Does it lend itself to follow-on products, accessories, support and training, etc.? Does it inspire others to be part of your wake? > > Whoever competes with the iPod has to compete with a lot more than Apple’s device–it has to compete with this great wall of stuff riding in the iPod wake. And these things all make the iPod a lot more appealing and flexible. > > Inspiring a wake–where passionate people add value to your product or service with new things–is one of the fabulous side-effects of having passionate users. And your chances of creating passionate users just keeps going up the larger the wake gets. So it’s a great big happy reinforcing feedback loop As we have also seen recently from Firefox, a wake can pay for ads, lead to a plug-in ecosystem and so on. It is important to encourage the wake though. That is one reason i think Apple can succeed this time around in a way it hasn’t before; by that i mean dominating a mass market rather than creating a market and watching another vendor take advantage. Let other people sell monitors, hard-drives or whatever for the Mac mini; that’s wakeful behaviour. Meanwhile just check out all [iPod accessories](http://www.google.com/search?q=ipod+accessories&sourceid=mozilla-search&start=0&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official) out there. I don’t know if the rhyme of metaphor was intended, but a Long Wake is a lot like a Long Tail. An ecosystem is not just a product launch, its a long standing conversation, and users can become more passionate about the boat, not less, over time. There are some important [ lessons for producers](http://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/2005/02/long_tail_faq_1.html) in these memes. Apple sometimes [tries to kill the passion and yet still succeeds](http://businesslogs.com/best_practices/should_apple_sue.php) so there don’t seem to be hard and fast rules, but I would certainly argue thinking about wake effects is a good way to think about ecosystems rather than just products. If you want to create passionate users give them a wake to surf. Somewhere to plug in and or sound off. So what about different meanings of “wake”, and their relevance to the meme? > wake > > n 1: the consequences of an event (especially a catastrophic event); “the aftermath of war”; “in the wake of the accident no one knew how many had been injured” \[syn: aftermath, backwash\] 2: an island in the western Pacific between Guam and Hawaii \[syn: Wake Island, Wake\] 3: the wave that spreads behind a boat as it moves forward; “the motorboat’s wake capsized the canoe” \[syn: backwash\] 4: a vigil held over a corpse the night before burial; “there’s no weeping at an Irish wake” \[syn: viewing\] v 1: be awake, be alert, be there \[ant: sleep\] 2: stop sleeping; “She woke up to the sound of the alarm clock” \[syn: wake up, awake, arouse, awaken, come alive, waken\] \[ant: fall asleep\] 3: arouse or excite feelings and passions; “The ostentatious way of living of the rich ignites the hatred of the poor”; “The refugees’ fate stirred up compassion around the world”; “Wake old feelings of hatred” \[syn: inflame, stir up, ignite, heat, fire up\] 4: make aware of; “His words woke us to terrible facts of the situation” 5: cause to become awake or conscious; “He was roused by the drunken men in the street”; “Please wake me at 6 AM.” \[syn: awaken, waken, rouse, wake up, arouse\] \[ant: cause to sleep\] > > Source: WordNet ® 2.0, © 2003 Princeton University So how about wakeful as a word like clueful. Get a clue. Get Awake!