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a. It gets annoying to watch the bickering
and
b. When you try to get away from the bickering, you can't find any normal people who are using the service yet because it's still in the early stages of life.
I definitely like it when everybody hangs out in stage 3 or decides to leave peacefully.
Keep up the great posts!
However, I question your idea that there are different (e.g. self-serving) motivations other than the (justified) excitement and hope of something better. I think services pushed by early adopters always deserve the excitement, but the creators can't always live up to the (infinite?) hopes of the early adopter, either because of lack of flexibility on their part or the commercial interests of shareholders in a later stage of the service.
For example: Maybe Facebook sucks (in 2008, "post-FriendFeed" terms) because of the fact that Mark Zuckerberg is not as smart as we thought he would be, or maybe because he can't open it up because of the interests of shareholders. (I'm being explicitly harsh against Facebook for the sake of the argument)
Also, a company like Apple shows that you can keep users being excited for one brand. It could mean that the main problem is that early adopters think company founders have some kind of infinite creativity, while in fact they just had one or two well-executed ideas.
In this case, I think there's nothing wrong to cheer for someone who decides to take over the lead. Even if the can't sustain that lead. Improving up on others is hard enough, always being the best is even harder.
Right now, I think Friendfeed has taken the lead in a certain dimension, so I think they deserve the cheering. But this doesn't perse means that they'll always have the lead. It is yet unclear if they have someone as adaptive as Steve Jobs. Of course I don't mean to say Apple will always have the lead in consumer electronics - one could argue about if they have right now - but, again, it's nice to use as an example.
More recent examples would be prioritizing FriendFeed over Twitter, or you could see people flock to Facebook and later, fall away from it. You can even see people telling FriendFeed what they should or shouldn't do, or saying it needs to play out the way they want.
Regarding Shanmac's comment, I would be a big Apple promoter, for sure, but now that they're in the leadership position, I don't feel the need to liveblog every keynote or wave the Apple flag. It's actually a very relaxing mode... like in #3, where we were vindicated as being right. I hope not to get to stage 4 or 5 with them.
Now, if you use FriendFeed's advanced search for the headline vs. Everybody and all services...
http://friendfeed.com/search?q=The+Five+Stages+...
You see 14 more from where I "tweeted" it. There were other postings and bookmarkings of it, but none got any comments in the main feed. The Social Media Room got one or two.
So the early adopter cycle happened. But it happened later in the site's lifespan, after it had opened up.
Now this certainly describes a large part of the early adopter population, but certainly not all of it. After all, if it weren't otherwise, the 1969-born Unix and the Internet would have never continue to be around — pretty much what we have nowadays was developed and deployed four decades ago, although certainly there has been further development and innovation. However, eager "early adopters" of both Unix and the Internet are still heavy promotors of both technologies — definitely on stage 3, and not stepping down from it.
But there are lots of similar examples. In fact, I would boldly claim that truly disruptive technologies (in the sense that they really dramatically change the way we think, feel, work, and use them) never leave your stage 3. Let's get a few examples... Linux ("Unix on the desktop PC for the masses"), Apache, MySQL, PHP (ten years and still going strong!), blogging (as a concept, not tied to any software platform), and of course the concept of portable music readers (iPod and variants) and — why not? — mobile phones.
So the point that you're trying to make is that most technology is not "disruptive" at all — it's just a fad, a fashion, something "cool" to have for a while, and like most of fashion, it peaks and fades away into nothingness. The industry — even in the most innovative area — prefers to capitalise on existing "concepts" and relaunch the same idea over and over again. We've seen that happening with Hi5/Ringo/Friendster/MySpace/Facebook/Ning — nothing new with each new platform, the concept might be sticking, but people just move to the next one launched, as they go through each of the 5 stages. So, are "social networking sites", as a concept, a disruptive technology? I might consider that they are not if there is no clear model emerging out of the mess... but just successive re-inventions based on the same concept (OpenSocial might be the way out of the mess) without any model sticking around for long. Amazon and eBay are definitely disruptive technologies, as anyone running a publishing company or a distribution company knows.
On the other hand, disruptive technology will never leave the 3th stage. And — surprise, surprise! — it's going to be always around in some form or other. Nobody can imagine that one of these days all Unix vendors will pack and go and say: "so! We had 40 years of Unix! Enough is enough; let's try something else" or "Let's get rid of TCP/IP and build a new Internet from scratch". No — disruptive technology stays around forever, even if it gets changed, improved, and re-developed as time goes by.
And there will always be people around doing the promotion of disruptive technology.
Speaking strictly for myself, I'm quite the early adopter on a lot of technologies, Web sites, and everything that attracts my attention... but I hardly ever leave phase one, and probably won't even enter the "promotion" stage of that! In fact, I believe that I'm currently just on Stage 3 of the following technologies: the Internet, Unix and its myriad clones, anything that comes out of Steve Job's head, and Second Life.
Many of these services are free. I don't know why I let myself get all wound up about them sometimes. After all, they don't owe me anything.
http://reboltutorial.com/blog/marketing-sits-ab...
First, I believe technologists tend to build products for themselves and use the influential early adopter as a gauge of their future success. But for the average consumer, collaboration isn't likely unless he or she attaches to the product, which only happens after engagement. Consumers should have a rightful sense of entitlement - that a product just works - and when it doesn't they tell more people about it then they do when it works as merchandised.
Second, I believe today's digital generation not only has shorter attention spans, but because of easy access to the infinite world market of goods, substitutes are readily available as is information about the alternatives.
What I conclude from this is that the notions of how an early adopter and the mainstream consumer behave are starting to merge.