* early adopters find a service and love it
* early adopters see the growth of a service as a reason it isn’t cool anymore
* mainstream users don’t care about the fancy frills as long as they know what it’s good for
* mainstream users don’t really like the early adopters – they’re dorks
* early adopters really don’t like the newbies – and what their sheer numbers are doing to the service

prediction:

* early adopters “abandoning” audiences of 9000+ are unwise
** friendfeed and twitter are hypercompatible so no biggie
* twitter rebrands successfully as a consumer mobile service as opposed to a micro-publishing tool
* early adopters switch to more powerful tools
* mainstream users avoid those more powerful tools until:
** they understand what it’s there for, like friendfeed literally lets you feed your friends and that’s something everybody suddenly wants more than what facebook/twitter already allow
** they are forced to see it everywhere like friendfeed integrating with gmail or igoogle or the blogosphere
** it literally replaces an existing behavior, such as friendfeed as a comment tool on blogs

these are just guesses but it seems very classic for an early adopter to scream about no at-replies when personally like 2% of my twitter feed is at-replies. people use twitter mostly to pulse out what they’re doing to a group of more or less intimately linked people.

the name “friendfeed” is not quite accurate as it is unlikely that people use friendfeed to actively communicate with actual friends (as they do with facebook). they mostly use it to meet and influence people who are not currently in their friend-set. this naming flaw alone will retard mainstream adoption of friendfeed.

thanks for a thought provoking article !!!

- srini kumar
metanotes.com