The emergence diffusion of Waze
Waze is a well known GPS navigation software application that has gained large amounts of popularity over the last 5 years. Waze collects data from users of the application to provide quicker, faster and safer routes for other users. This occurs in the form of either automatic collection through the speed of the vehicle or data can be entered manually by the user. Oftentimes, users report accidents, traffic jams, speed traps and many other factors that could influence the drivers route.
Similar to what we studied in class, a sort of diffusion occurs for the users of this application. As more and more individuals use the application it incentivizes other users to also use the application as it would benefit your experience as well. Specifically, the more users of the app the more alerts that will be posted about cop cars, traffic lights, accidents, ect.. This would result in faster and safer journeys to your final destination. However, the diffusion that occurred with this application is hard to see with millions of people.
Personally, I learned about Waze in 2015 and would use it quite often to travel to soccer games. However, as not many people were familiar with Waze it was not as helpful as it could have been, so my family and I ended up taking a small break from using it. It wasn’t until a year later that I began hearing that several of my friends and family were starting to use the application, which incentivized me to redownload it and use it again. However I noticed how much better the Waze had become and how many more alerts and warnings about accidents, traffic jams, speed traps and police cars were popping up while driving. This increase in the number of people using the application caused a mass benefit on all the other users of Waze. Till this day I still use Waze to travel places.
This concept of diffusion is something we see in our everyday life, but we may not even know it is occurring. For instance, this past year the social media app TikTok caused a whole diffusion in my friend group as more and more individuals began downloading it.