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Are you saying that Google (or even Yahoo Buzz) will be their introduction? Is there a better way?
So we can expect social media adoption to lag a bit too, although I think by its very nature web 2.0 will catch on more rapidly than the less social web 1.0... kinda of an oroborotic positive feedback loop.
That might have been redundant, but I love mentioning the oroboros. ;-)
Late adopters don't care about twitter, let alone friendfeed.
Here is a question though: Will Friendfeed be around in 6 years? How about twitter?
By that time, I'm sure all of us "in the know" will have moved on. Late adopters will have jumped aboard the twitter bandwagon. Speaking of late adopter - when is Qik going to support more phones????
Rex
When is Qik going to support more phones? They are working on it. So are Kyte.tv (which is funded by Nokia, so they probably aren't working that hard on it). Flixwagon. and Bambuser.
Late adopters will look at Twitter as useless. They will look at FriendFeed as an aggregator of what and for whom? Late adopters are still not comfortable with text messaging.
Late adopters are wary of anything that their friends and neigbors are not doing. Late adopters look at Youtube as a teen fad destroying the moral fiber of America.
Late adopters don't even know they are late adopters and think they are pretty tech savvy.
Another name for 'early adopters' would be social media researchers.
Another name for 'late adopters' would be 'mainstream users'.
It's really not a matter of being switched on or not - it's a matter of real business value.
Perhaps a more appropriate term for our current situation is dead rot. The tree rots away from within and it comes as a big surprise one day when the tree comes crashing down. Sound familiar?
And stop being so US-centric ;) Yes your economy isn't doing so well but nobody is in the position to just bunker down, you've got plenty of problems and dealing with them will jolt your economy forwards.
Is YouTube really mainstream, though? Depends on how you define it. There's six billion people in the world who still don't own a computer. I guess we're all early adopters here.
Facebook statuses do basically the same thing as Twitter for me, and I at least know that my friends are seeing it.
It's not as if the late adopters wouldn't find these services valuable, they just don't have (or make) the time or interest to seek out new tools because they make due with what they have and it works for them. There's no good reason for them to explore other options until someone proves the benefit. And sometimes the benefits aren't obvious until you've been using them for a while.
As for things like Twitter and FriendFeed they take an enormous amount of time and effort to get value out of. You're lucky, Robert, because you have a huge network and a lifestyle that lets you constantly participate. For other people like me who are restricted during working hours from taking part and can't builid up a network of followers so I actually get responses when I contribute or ask a question there is much less value besides entertainment.
There also seems to be a barrier for late adopters in virtual vs real world contacts. Most of them participate in real world communities with people they know in the flesh or who are at least in their physical communities. There's less interest in knowing about the weather or where someone had lunch unless you can experience that yourself. Out of the hundreds of people I interact with on a regular basis during the week, I only know 3-5 who actively participate in social media. I wish I knew more people like me in meatspace!
Ubiquitousness will come in a few years but not until some of the barriers to entry are removed and that's what the early adopters do.
Google has mindshare. It does not, however, deliver the best results. I look for some pretty obscure stuff on travel quite frequently, and Google rarely comes back with the results I'm seeking.
If developers don't create mainstream sites, then don't mock and ridicule the mainstream for not showing up.
I for one am sick to death of hearing "they don't get it." From where I sit, it's early adopters who don't "get" anybody but those who look and act and think like they do.
My 80-something parents turn to Google when they want information. Just a matter of time before they start asking about Twitter - or not. But the point is they're inadvertently getting exposed to alien ideas in a non-threatening way. And that can (sometimes) lead to change.
Especially as all the sharks will jump on this to "help" people get out of the downturn. this proofs that Google sees your blog as an authority.
Most recessions aren't officially called for months, and upon revision of data.
Most experts think that when it's all said and done, this current recessions will be said to have officially started in december 2007 or january 2008.
However - I do like your DHED.org initiative =)
There are only early adopters who consume technology when it is first introduced. These early adopters, in the case of HD TVs, pay a premium for being early to the party. Without early adopters, the mainstream wouldn't have products and services to eventually adopt.
With the Internet, the application adoption curve is even more elongated. Google is mainstream and Yahoo is mainstream and look how long they've been around. Defining mainstream is difficult, but I think the simplest definition is if my 70 year old mother uses the technology, it is mainstream, and she is very technically inept.
Robert, you are surely on the "bleeding edge" for Web technology and I think you are so far out in front of the mainstream that they can't even see you anymore and when they read your stuff they see big question marks in their head and quickly move on.
Oh, and I re-read your post a couple of times and I agree with a previous poster. I don't get the answer to your title. How do late adopters get into social media? By Googl'ing a subject and stumbling upon a site like yours?
Martin Feldstein, head of NBER said on March 7, 2007: I think that December/January was the peak and that we have been sliding into recession ever since then. I think it could go on longer last two recessions (which) lasted eight months peak to trough".
NBER is the National Bureau of Economic Research, the ones who make the official call.
http://www.reuters.com/article/bondsNews/idUSN0...
I wait for the initial buzz to fade off. Then, I let all my new media fanfriends evangelize me. And when they just about give up on getting me into something, I join.
Scoble's Glossary:
early adopter = bleeding edge - before it hits even the pre-radars
late adopter = early adopter - just hit the radar screen and becoming popular
mainstreamer = peak adopter - everybody does it
really old hat = actual late adopter - everybody's been doing it for years, now something else is really popular
dinosaurs = trivia collectors - long after everyone else has moved on to that something else
I can't tell whether you're tongue-in-cheek with that call to the "newbies" to ignore FF for 6 years.
Technology accelerates, change accelerates, they accelerate each other, and no, that doesn't mean they are all headed to that retarded "singularity" thingie, but they are making things more complex, and more needful of curators who don't stop the flow to be analyzed by others.
I'll never forgot what this one guy wanted to do with Samizdat (which was the Soviet version of blogs, really, in the 1980s lol). "Self-publishing" is what the word means. He wanted to take everybody's retyped freely copied passed-on samizdat and bundle it and re-sell it, after somebody else who had aggregated it as a favour passed it to him...dog in the manger. I'm all for proprietary intellectual property. But if something is released into Samizdat, don't try to hog it and predict about it and try to control how others will use it.
The recession is worse than you're feeling it, too.
Social media might up that to 25 or even 50, but it doesn't mean that "late-comers" who come to the blogging tools will themselves also want to make a blog. They may skip that step.They may only make a Flickr. Or a Twitter. Or skip all of those and circle back to real life. Or just read blogs. Or...you just don't know.
I don't think you can assume a linear development where first 10 percent use blogs then eventuallly 100 percent make blogs. Blogs are kinda stupid things. Not everyone will want to make them. Or read them.
Only 20 percent of voters read political blogs. My God, that may be a GOOD thing.
I want to communicate with my friends. And by friends I mean real life friends, not someone who I only meet online that I will never meet in person.
I want a "community" of real people, who care about things that I care about and who share my burdens and concerns... 5,000 friends on Facebook can't do this.
Seems like we have gotten way to in-personal when we should be striving to bring back community.
What type of adopter am I?
WOW. You're assuming that anyone coming to your blog from Google on the Recession 2008 search of Google is some retarded late-comer to social media and just a casual Internet google user.
Huh? The person searching Recession 2008 could be your IT geeky plugged-in neighbour in Half-Moon Bay, Robert, looking up the news to see if he will lose his job.
And...the Recession 2008 search words with you at the top of them lets us also know how stupid the whole Google algorithm thing is, and how it doesn't serve people, because it gives them as ostensibly "the most authoritative" or "the most popular" a blog that isn't about the recession, that is a snarky comment by a guy who isn't feeling the recession, who hasn't really an informed opinion about the recession.
That's Google for you! The main thing is that Sergey and Larry have it worked out so that their Silicon Valley pals can always turn up first as influencers lol.
Then all the hapless saps coming to your page in genuine research on recession 2008 by experts or sufferers or crowd wisdom merely find your page just because...you have a fancy tech-talk site which high Google traffic/cred.
See, it's this sort of power and influence that makes you think you can decide candidates for elections.
Of course, if you measure it in Euros...
well, I'm sticking with youtube..
So what type of adopter that makes me?
I love that, going to quote it.
Question: What do late-adopters call themselves? They're not generally aware they're in that category. It's a term we've coined for them. Would be cool to use a term they identify with.
I try to address everyone at the same level in my posts (though my posts lately are Twitter-centric). Early, late, or random passerby, each visitor is simply there to learn.
Haven't used Twitter yet, see no need to do so. I do read many RSS feeds and even have a few of my own.
- a recession is a temporary reduction in economic output; 'temporary' is defined by US authorities as 'two consecutive quarters' — as it's been eight months, you have all the official blessings to use the word;
- a depression is a sustained reduction in output — USA might be starting to experience one, but you have to wait for more bad news to say so.
There is no official limit between the two, although after year, you hardly can expect a speady recovery.
What is not well defined is an economic standstill, or rather a growth not significant enough to be considered positive or negative; Scoble, you seem to be assuming this is the current situation: it is in many countries, but not in the USA.
- having your money representing less is called 'an inflation'; the opposite is 'a deflation'; the word itself doesn't assume anything about why;
- if the prices on a market drop, it is a deflation; 'why' requires assumtions :
* because of a bubble, then it is a 'bust';
* because of a real, sudden change in economic value, in which case it is a 'drop caused by exogenous event'.
Your pick is: was it reasonnable to have 15$/bar. oil in 2003, when billions opposed the Iraq invasion in vain, describing how violence in the region never lowered oil prices?
As you can see, what you describe seems contradictory: are prices going up or down?
Suburban real-estate is complementary to oil: its consumption, and therefore value, is moving in the opposite direction of gas prices. What might be a better measure of USA's economic situation is the output without oil "artificial" (exogenous) increase — and it should be far worst then what is officially described; sorting price effects on the rest of the economy draws an even grimmer picture.
Both of what you describe are only true for the American market: if you look at the wheat-to-gold or the oil-to-gold ratio, the prices are significantly going up, but not in the proportions you describe. The global total real-estate investment, has been historically high, and what you have seen recently is nothing more then a cooling, a deceleration. The current situation on the American market are not news to anyone who realised no country can borrow trillions and not produce anything with it.
All these situations can legitimately be called with other words (including you anagram) most of which I would refrain to use — but if you want to be simple & accurate, talk about "a recession caused by exogenous inflation".
Regarding "late adopters" or "mass marketing", either expressions imply a given relevant market — and there are currently orders of magnitude of difference between the PC (Facebook) and the mobile (Twitter) users. I wouldn't use them, but rather define their asset and skills.
What seems to be missing in your Google-world is YouTube, and e-mail. The company is still unanimouly leading among people with access to internet.
Regarding Twitter, I gave my Twitter name (Jimconnolly) on the front page of my new blog http://theideasblog.com and asked my readers to add me to their Twitter account, if they wanted to.
The two things I discovered was:
1. The people who added me, use Twitter for everything from listing job vacancies to advertising their podcasts. Very few are from here in the UK.
2. Most of my readers (it's an ideas sharing blog) generally don't even have a Twitter account. I have had loads of email from people asking 'what's Twitter?'.
Interesting eh?
Jim Connolly
The Ideas Blog
But you get "it" thus art special, and anointed by God -- however, everyone else, who doesn't get it, is "late" and obviously in league with the Devil. Welcome to your new Cult, hope you like the accommodations, complete with 250 traffic-linking brown-nosers at your service.
Technology is meant to have a purpose, a means to an end, that purpose varies by individual, some like it for it's own sake, others want it to actually function so they can produce something else.
The fact that some people aren't using your current shiny toys, right this second, simply means you haven't met or fulfilled a need. And 95% of the stuff getting Techcrunch nods won't ever scale or meet those needs.
Twitter posts are already indexed by Google!
Jim Connolly
Why?
Because they took too much time for not enough benefit. I can communicate in Facebook or Email what I can communicate in Twitter. Facebook is great because it helps you reconnect with old friends and share with your current friends. But, twitter and Friendfeed, like someone said above take a lot of work to really get a benefit.
You must remember people in this world are into different things. Some collect stamps and some stay online and broadcast themselves online 24/7.
Is there anything wrong with Twitter or Friendfeed know, but it will not change the world, because they are very targeted to a niche audience, who want to spend their whole lives online.
Of course I could be wrong about this. Twitter and Friendfeed will grow in popularity but they will never reach the mass adoption of google which prides itself on only taking up a small portion of your day.
Twitter and Friendfeed hardly define early adopters...really just focuses in on those that have far too much time available to them...god bless them all as they continue to make a lot of us very wealthy...
1 tweet per second = lame and also inherantly identifies a service with a limited life.
neo