Robert Scoble today wrote an interesting post about early adopters and how vital they are to technological progress. Not only do I happen to strongly agree with him but it got me thinking about it a little further.
I'm a beta fiend and, I suppose, that qualifies me as an early adopter even though I am a bit late coming into the whole social networking scene. I may be extra cautious around alphas but, if it's there and if it's software I'd like to use, I don't hesitate to throw betas all over my OS. In fact, I kind of thrive on it; I like the feeling of progress as I download and install an endless stream of incremental updates that crush this one bug here and tweak that feature there. There is for me a bit of a weird thrill knowing I'm using the latest feature set whether it's in Opera, Firefox, Digsby, Trillian, or a place like Profy which is, as I write that, still in an invite-only beta mode. Why is that? Why do I like it so much? Is it something about being on the very edge of development?
Why are people so excited about social networking? Could it be for the same reason? That they just want to be the first on the block to have the latest, greatest whatever or is there something more subtlety psychological going on? Why did I get into social networking? Personally, I think it's because, for the first time since I accessed the Internet (through a crusty old University VAX machine in the late 80s), I felt like I was actually a part of something personal. Even when I'm away from my computer, I have this awareness that things are happening, wires are buzzing, and Twitter and FriendFeed are edging ever forward one shared link, witty comment, and blog post alert at a time. Sometime between the late 80s and the turn of the century (man, I love using that phrase), the Internet had crumbled apart, stopped feeling like a unified community, and had lost the feeling of being a wild frontier which it used to have in the early days. You know, when the majority of the e-mail addresses you saw in the newsgroups ended in .edu or .gov. You know, when newsgroups was the center of the Internet. You know, when you used to have to ask people, '
Do you have an e-mail address,' rather than, '
What is your e-mail address'. But, this is about more than nostalgia.
Or, is it? How many early adopters adopt early because it reminds them of their youthful days on the Internet, when it all felt like some kind of like-minded community? To me, the whole concept behind Web 2.0 feels like it's really just trying to recapture that initial furor and the romance of the early Internet. In a sense, Twitter, FriendFeed, Pownce, and on and on, together these sites create a new Internet within the Internet. It reinvigorates and reminds us of why we got involved in it in the first place. I'm pretty sure it wasn't to tap into an astronomical onslaught of porn or simply to steal movies and music. I don't know about the rest of you but my earliest Internet memories were of hanging around newsgroups getting involved in conversations with strangers which, essentially, is what we're doing now with Web 2.0 but perhaps with a touch less niavete.
But, what about the people who have gotten involved in social networking who don't have this kind of pedigree? They're certainly not doing it to recapture some slice of Internet youth. Of course not. They're most likely in the middle of experiencing that very same thing that others had long ago. I don't mean to suggest that Internet tenure automatically implies a kind of cynicism but being around for a long time also doesn't mean that you're not deserving a breath of fresh air. I'm not saying that social networking is some kind of HTTP-fueled fountain of youth but it's certainly not hurting.
I mean, just look at how some people attack it, get into it, base at least some major part of their lives around it. It obviously has tapped into something collective and positive in a lot of people, which I think is wonderful. It makes the Internet seem wild and young again. And, like a flaky 28.8 dial-up connection pushing SLIP, we experience the same kind of frustrating hiccups as we attempt to get subsequently deeper drinks from that fountain of youth.
And, by that, I mean that Twitter keeps going down.
Dammit.
