All My Lifes a Circle
Sure, it’s a great song by Harry Chapin, but it’s also how I’m thinking about people interacting with new technology. It seems to go something like this:
- New technology gets announced
- Alpha Adopters check it out, some stay, some leave
- Tech Blogs pick up on it and write about it
- 2nd wave of people come in to check it out
- Critical mass builds
- Influencers start talking about it
- More people start signing up and servers get slower
- Backlash begins
- More people sign up
- Major press starts picking up on it
- FLURRY of new people, servers really screwed now
- More backlash, calls of waste of time, etc
- People leave
- People who get it stay and help it evolve
Yeah I generalized a lot but I think this holds true. I’ve watched it happen in the early days of Blogging and Podcasting. Now I’m watching it happen with things like Second Life and Twitter.
What is also “fun” to watch is people trying to figure out the proper etiquette of whatever tool/space they are using. The alpha adopters sort of figure it out and then every newbie that comes in fumbles around and figures it out. What is great is with such a compressed time frame in which this whole circle happens the concept of what is “proper” evolves and shifts more then a pile of silly putty. Plus, I’m a firm believer that there is a huge lack of definition around what is the “right” way to do anything. More fun that way.
This is rather deep for this early in the morning. But, I had been marinating on it for a little while and had to spit it out before I filed it away to the dark cobweb corner of the brain. You never know what’s back there and I didn’t want this idea to get scared.
March 30th, 2007 at 8:22 am |
You’re right on but you left out the final chapter - you stopped on the downcycle. Even though the backlash is there, eventually people get tired of complaining and it continues to grow until some period of time (2 to 3x the length of the backlash) everyone is taking it for granted as an everyday part of life.
Gartner has a Hype Cycle graph that I love, I was yammering about it here:
http://www.themshow.com/wordpress/2007/03/03/video-inflection-point/
March 30th, 2007 at 10:23 am |
This has been on my mind a lot lately - especially with using Twitter right now and watching people complain about the slowness, because they are hooked and therefore frustrated when they can’t get more of it. Fascinating to watch technology evovle so rapidly right before our eyes.
March 30th, 2007 at 11:12 am |
You’re reading my mind CC… I’ve been thinking about this very cycle this week.
I agree with John. But this is often were differences in the cycle occur. Sometimes it begins to grow once again as John explains. On the other side, sometimes the money dumped into these services at it’s peak becomes a thorn in those that invested in the service. They realize it’s not as popular as it was during it’s peak. The margin of profit goes down, the company lets the service limp again, and it dies.
March 30th, 2007 at 2:31 pm |
Hmm, great minds thinking a like… funny I just commented on Twitter being like the internet “water or steam pipe” running through our online space on blog and podcast. Good post. Be interesting to see how Second Life and twitter continue to evolve and how we help mutate them.
April 24th, 2007 at 9:51 pm |
[…] Combine all of this with the fact that Twitter has had some serious growth issues of late, as has been documented by several people. If the tool can’t be productive, or is so unproductive that it leads to an outright revolt, how much of a successful and positive model can it be? I won’t even get into the complete absurdity of the idea of emergency responders using Twitter with all the unreliability going around. There’s a reason why most of the worlds hardware and software manufacturers, including Microsoft, Apple, Dell, and HP, have specific warranty exclusions regarding use on nuclear, medical or life-saving equipment. […]