I have been thinking a bit more about the chances for the recent crop of Web 2.0 social media darlings like FriendFeed and Twitter to go mainstream and especially why FriendFeed has gone from zero to being the default social media aggregator for most folks in the tech blogosphere within just a few months while staying pretty much unknown outside of the early adopter tech world. In doing so, I kept wondering if the gap between early adopters and mainstream users isn’t expanding more and more and what that means for services that cater mostly to early adopters.
Corvida from SheGeeks also has some thoughts about the mainstreaming of FriendFeed, Twitter and RSS and at the end, she concludes:
Maybe the masses aren’t ready for these platforms. Still, these are early adopter tools, regardless of the growth that one may be seeing. They all have the potential to go mainstream, but there’s a lot of work to be done. We’re still in our own bubble. Or are we?
I think we are indeed in our own bubble and in some ways, FriendFeed is the natural result of living in that bubble.
Let me backtrack for a moment here:
For any web app (or any product for that matter) to become successful with mainstream, non über-techie users, it first and foremost has to solve a problem. FriendFeed doesn’t really solve a problem for most mainstream users. It’s great for us geeks who have friends scattered all over the Internet, all of whom use Twitter, Jaiku, Flickr, blogs, reddit, delicious, last.fm etc.
Just have a look at the ‘everyone‘ stream on FriendFeed and you quickly get a feeling for who the current users are. Hint: it’s not people sharing photos with their grandparents.
It’s the same reason a lot of people don’t see too much use in using an RSS Reader - you don’t need one if you only browse to five different sites everyday for your news.
I have a feeling that the gap between early adopters and mainstream users isn’t getting any smaller, but rather expanding. A lot of the new services cater mostly towards early adopters, but don’t really solve a problem for mainstream web users.
Maybe if there is a bubble that’s going to pop one of these days it’s going to be VCs realizing that they are better off investing in companies that are serving more mainstream problems (like Mint does for managing finances) and start shying away from more edgy, cutting edge early adopter oriented services
A good point. This is why I’ve been saying that the current services won’t be the ones going mainstream.
Look at the various offerings and you will find the usual suspects (I plead guilty here) ‘friending’ the same people and the wall around the echo chamber gets reinforced.
You bring up some good points.
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.
That does not mean that I have faith that FF, the service will be here, which is why I am building some life streaming functionality into my site, seanreiser.com
Great points Frederic! I agree that the gap between EA and MS is widening and I think it’s happening very rapidly. However, Myspace went mainstream and I think it’s created a host of problems rather than solving them. Their entire site is a problem (from a design perspective at least).
I have to ask though, if VC’s started shying away from what “we” use and headed towards mainstream, where would that leave us? Could we still be early adopters? What the heck would we use?
On another note, most of these apps (Twitter, Friendfeed) are SOCIAL media and not necessarily put in place to solve problems like financing. It’s all about socializing, which Myspace and Facebook cater to. Keeping this in mind, I’m baffled as to why Twitter hasn’t already gone mainstream. It’s getting there, but it’s been over a year with barely a dent in MS. Maybe “our” services are just foundations to something bigger that’s right around the corner.
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