Have to agree. No offense to the FF guys, but the FF hype is incredibly premature. Whether or not there will ever be mainstream adoption is very much in question and even if there is that time is a ways off. Things have gotten awfully loud here in the echo chamber.... - Jonathan
Agree as well. I'm @ .edu and explaining Twitter is like pulling teeth. Most faculty are not just getting comfortable w/ platforms like Moodle/Blackboard to teach online. Throw Twitter in the mix and they think they need to choose....Bb or Twitter instead of saying " I can use these tools together " This is the challenge for all these new tools. You gotta convince mainstream to adopt and apply to life/career or whatever. Early adopters don't pay the bills mainstream does. - Matt Long
Matt: that's not true (that early adopters don't pay the bills). There's lots of misunderstandings of the role of early adopters here, though. Think about it. If we were back in 1977 we'd be having the same discussion about personal computers and why only geeks would buy them. If you came to that conclusion back then you'd be dead wrong. Just like now. - Robert Scoble
The thing is, you can't JUST have early adopters. You need them, then some middleware people who aren't as geeky to see the potential, who then evangelize it to the mainstream. Taste Tribe leaders, I suppose. You need all three groups to make something ubiquitous, like personal computing. - Rob via Alert Thingy
@Scoble, Exactly I was just writing up that in 2002, when Flickr launched, the average user saw no need to have a site to share all their photos here we 6 years later and everyone's grandmother uses Flickr (ok, exaggerating, but you get my point). in 5 years time when the average folks will be getting the bulk of their media from the interwebs, a FF style service will be important. - Sean Reiser
Scoble: Try telling that to the early adopters of Betamax, HD-DVD, minidisc, etc. There are technologies that fail, plain and simple. I don't think Twitter or FF will be around in a few years but something else might. - Shawn Farner via twhirl
@Scoble That's not at all a valid comparison. At some point, everyone had to have a computer whereas there's very little chance that Twitter/FF will rise to that level of necessity. - Jonathan
Early Adopters and Beta apps are just the blueprint or Outline for the eventual product. Take RSS for example. It doesn't matter what you use to harness it as long as you use it to be more productive. Really it looks like everyone is fussing over their favorite tree and which tree is better when what counts is the FOREST the trees are in... - Anthony Farrior
I've always known that I had AADD (adult attention deficit disorder) but I havev evolved my opinion that MOST of the folks highly involved with technology suffer from this. Today with SOOOoooo many new tools and technologies it is even more difficult to maintain a focus. This jumping around makes that gap widen even quicker. What do the rest of you think? - 2WheelTech
Early adopters are great "beta testers" to see if an idea is viable. But solid services must prove themselves with the mainstream - that is the best chance to pay the bills. It's arguably way easier to impress a bunch of geeks who are already into technology and hooked in 24/7. Now try to convince someone of a service's value who needs a really good reason to turn on the computer. - Jason Kaneshiro
Early Adopter idea is limiting. Communities and personal styles are also important. FF might be mainstream for bloggers, yet early adopter for techies. Facebook is mainstream for college kids, but early-adopter for age 40-45 Harvard alumni (only 2-3%), and out-of-the-rader for general public. Out of my ~1200 Yahoo! Mail addresses, 93 on Facebook, 10 on Twitter, and 0 on FriendFeed. And Facebook seems to be post-mainstream (aka old news) for the bloggers here. Track early adopter/mainstream vs community. - Mitchell Tsai
I wrote a post about this very issue: http://davidadewumi.com/2008/0... just because a blogger wants something to be true (i.e. this product will succeed) does not make it so - David Adewumi
