Steve Rubel recently wrote that the early adopters are out of shiny new objects to play with. Twitter has grown immensely over the past year, Facebook has become commonplace by every member of the household, and we’re increasingly salivating at the thought of Apple’s purported iSlate. Although I agree whole-heartedly with Steve, whom I also work with, my thoughts recently haven’t been on the early adopters or the next big thing in the social web. My thoughts have been with my friends, the one’s who aren’t obsessed with all this dork 2.0 stuff, they’re the majority and they’re about to become more involved in the social web than ever before.
In the past few weeks a number of my friends who are budding journalists, comedians, industrial designers, gossipers, chefs, etc.have mentioned starting up a blog or joining Twitter. Many of these friends used to mention blogging in similar vein to keeping a journal in a pink heart shaped diary but it now seems that they too have caught the bug. They mention their hobbies and true passions and curiously question how the web can help them ignite some displaced desire to escape the corporate 9-5. I can’t help but think that there are millions of friends just like mine that share the same feeling.
It’s easy to become so immersed in the shiny-new-object crowd that we forget about the majority of people who’ve never posted a status update, tweeted, or written a review on Yelp. These social behaviors only emerged in the past decade and undoubtedly it will take time to become ingrained in the psych of the late majority. It will seem unnatural (and possibly nonsensical) to many at first but overtime become part of our daily routine. One day social behavior online will be innate, it will be akin to how a new parent today describes their child’s amazing inborn ability to push the buttons of a laptop or tap the screen of an iPhone (or Nexus One). Children will be more immersed in the web than we ever were and able to retrieve and process information more efficiently as well.
In the meantime, I’m extremely excited about my friends and the millions like them who are about tackle the internet. As adoption of social platforms grows and gains momentum local markets will see a similar level of online engagement and interaction as I enjoy in New York City with apps like Foursquare, who are now global, and Yelp. They’ll push the boundaries and have lots of questions; some of their needs have already been answered by today’s applications and tools, but some of their problems may only be solved with one of those shiny new objects Steve and the rest of us are hoping for.
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