Apr

18

Where is the Tribe Going?

April 18, 2007 |

Tim Bray is asking some interesting questions about the tribal nature of us tech folks (and if you are reading this, you are probably one of ‘us’). He recounts how a joke he made about Twitter at a tech conference (Web Design World) fell flat because nobody there had heard about Twitter.

It became apparent that most of them hadn’t heard of Twitter. The same joke (I’m a slow learner) fell flat at a meeting of University IT and Computer Science people a week later in Calgary. So let’s take this as evidence of the insularity and smallness—and, perhaps, unimportance—of the Internet In-crowd.

James Robertson had a similar experience with his daughter:

I think what we have is a large niche of social software users. Periodically, I ask my daughter (age 13) or her friends about things I’m seeing or working with : Blogs, RSS, Twitter, social networks. The funny thing is, most of them are heavy users of IM, but very few of them have gotten past the “I’ve heard of that” stage with things like Xanga, MySpace, etc. Before I brought it up, none of them had even heard of Twitter (and they all declared it “stupid” upon seeing it).

And believe me, I have the same experience every day when I talk to my college students. Just looking at their email addresses tells you something: AOL and the decrepit university email system we use here which hasn’t seen an update since it graduated from the green-screen mainframe terminals that used to dot our campus until 1999. This year, I had one student who used a gmail address. Yet, when I get email from any Web 2.0 geek, it is a gmail address by default.

I asked my students about Twitter this morning (mind you, this is an English class, but the students are a good mix of every conceivable major). Nobody knew what I was talking about. Myspace, Facebook, no problem. Some students use Google for web searches - a lot use Yahoo! or ask.com. Even my friends who are Computer Science PhD students don’t know what is happening on the web. How many people do you know who subscribe to an RSS feed? In Google Reader?

As an aside: There seems to be this general idea that kids in college are at the forefront when it comes to technology. I say: BS. Most of my students can hardly get a photo off their digital camera. They don’t know how to use their computers beyond AIM and most don’t know how to even change the margins of a document in Word.

All of this confirms what Jon Udell is pointing out today:

What’s more, I believe this tribe is, over time, growing farther away from the rest of the world. That’s happening for an interesting and important reason, which is that the tools we are building and using are accelerating our ability to build and use more of these tools. It’s a virtuous cycle in that sense, and it’s the prototype for methods of Net-enabled collaboration that can apply to everyone.

We have tried Twitter and have moved on to the next thing before the ‘real world’ has even heard of twitter. We recorded podcasts before even most college kids had heard of the word. We watched Ze Frank until he quit - yet nobody else I know ever watched him.

Is this a bad thing? Maybe not. After all, over time, early adopters are the ones who filter out the crap. Or maybe not. Maybe we just filter out what seems like crap to us, yet could be great for more mainstream and less technical users. Maybe our demands are what drives new products into feature overload.

Like all groups on the internet, we overestimate the size of our tribe and the influence we have. Maybe nobody cares about us. Maybe we don’t influence anything.

Update: Rafe Colburn on rc3.org has a few things to say about this from a developer’s perspective.

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2 Comments so far

  1. beansworth on April 19, 2007 10:21 am

    People who haven’t heard of Twitter and Xanga and RSS are behind the curve? I doubt it. I think there are just a lot of social networking sites and bookmarking sites and blogs. Knowing of something that not many people use doesn’t make you cutting edge, but it does give you an over-inflated sense of the importance of your interests, like the biker who told me, “What? You don’t ride? Why the hell not?” or the indie rockers who sneer, “What? You’ve never heard Neutral Milk Hotel?” I think your last theory is correct.

  2. Mike Caulfield on May 29, 2007 5:33 pm

    But you *have* heard of Neutral Milk Hotel, right?

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