Web 2.0 Echochamber: Another Reality

Everytime I'm in a room (and this is often) where the presenter asks the audience 'who's using what?' I'm always amazed by the number of hands that go up. Welcome to my world - the world of early adopters.

I am particularly amused by the show of hands who are Twitter, FaceBook, flickr and MySpace users. While there seems to be a generation shift recently with FaceBook, I wonder how long lived it is and how the user base breaks down geographically.

A few reality checks about things I'm told over and over again in the Silicon Valley echochamber:

Last year, I went to a flickr party and was the oldest person in the room. I attended the event with a 27 year old girlfriend who is a lawyer in the Valley. She dragged along three lawyer friends from LA, all roughly her age and none of them had even heard of flickr.

"Everyone is using Twitter," I'm told. I don't get it and won't. It's not that I'm not open to trying something new - it doesn't solve a problem for me that is need of fixing, nor does it improve my life. Nor do I even think its cool. As for useful? Perhaps at a three or four day conference in a foreign city for all of those three or four days.

The desktop is dead. Hmmmm. I'm not a very early adopter like my industry buds Robert Scoble or Howard Morgan, but I'm most definitely an early adopter. As a small business, I live on the desktop with the exception of search, some online purchases and my blog. Where does email reside? In Outlook, not gmail.

It doesn't mean that I don't have a gmail or yahoo account. I have so many email accounts, I can't even count them all. I actually use 70% of them, but where I am most productive is in a desktop email app where my favorites, files and preferences are stored. Here, turnaround is fast. Email on a web browser doesn't give me speed. I'd love to race anyone who says the web is more efficient or productive.

I'm also told that I 'must' join FaceBook. Why MUST I join FaceBook? How will it make my life more productive or fill a need that is (and this is key) NOT already being met? If I respond with: I'm not really their target audience, people will try to convince me I'm wrong.

Inside this broad early adopter echochamber, its hard to argue with a) not everyone in the world is convinced I need this and b) I really may just not be the target audience. Here's a new reality check for you.

I decided to do a few searches for a handful of remembered friends from high school and college across several countries through Google. Zero. Nothing. "Not possible," I found myself saying as I sat on the couch at 3 in the morning, plugging more and more names into the system.

Then, I moved to Wikipedia. I didn't expect the latter to pull up anyone -- possibly one or two if someone had authored a book or spoke on a national circuit, but I was surprised to come up empty handed.

So, I decided to try a little exercise. I pulled out two high school yearbooks and plugged in close to 400 names. In this search, I used their name + my home town as well as their name alone, using a married name as well if I knew it.

Obviously for women who married and didn't keep their maiden name, I potentially lost 40% of my sample size. Yet not all of them married or took their husband's name. None of my family members were found anywhere on the net except for a cousin who owns a mechanic shop in a small New England town. I tried twenty childhood, high school and college girlfriends using their maiden and married names - nothing. Welcome to another world. Another reality.

After going through the yearbooks from two states (Florida -- pop: 100,000 and upstate New York -- pop: 15-20,000), I came up with the following results:

--a one liner for someone who was a local firefighter, still in same county
--a two liner on someone picked up for drunk driving
--a two liner for someone who was sentenced to six months in a local jail and a fine
--an old friend, who I still keep in touch with, who is now editor of the local newspaper (yeah, they still read them there)
--a one line listing of someone who is now a sales manager at a radio station within 30 miles (I think -- no photo attached)
--LinkedIn - ONE, and he just joined. Also an old friend, who is a financial advisor in Vermont
--One family blog that only has photos, no blog posts (two internal links and it appears to be inactive)
--In the online phone book, I found eight listings
--Two family obituary references

One family blog that really isn't a blog, two bios on a website and one website of a massage therapist. No blogs, no newspaper articles, no mentions, no history or recording of them on the Web.

Sure, its largely a generation thing. Yet, I'm told that 'everyone' in my generation is using these services. And there certainly are older mainstream users on sites like eSnips (a client). While this exercise most certainly proved a point, I didn't expect to find nothing of substance.

In an odd way, it made me feel like a ghost, as if I was standing alone in an online world. Not that I had a desire to reach everyone in the class, but if I had, it would require a lot of effort. No doubt, some of these people will be listed on classmates.com or have a 'hidden blog' or profile somewhere on the Web.

We have no idea how far we have come in LESS than one generation until we do a surreal exercise like this one. A reminder that there are always other realities and choices when we think there is only one.

Update: Todd Sawicki did a follow up blog post about this very issue.