A Day in the Life of the Tech Middle Class
by
on June 21, 2008,
My initial reaction to Steven Hodson's post about the digital divide between the haves and the have nots has stuck with me, but apparently, 10 days is too long for it to have remained in the attention-deficit world of the Twitterati. The gap between the designers and the intended users is growing ever wider, and you have to wonder if the eventual fate of Web 2.0 won't be a result of the chasm in the middle.
Personally, this week has been one of increasingly long periods of time with reduced connectivity for me. Playing single parent for the week, I've had to take the kids to more activities than usual, some of them lasting up to three hours in duration. None of the locations has had WiFi. In order to get any writing done at all, I load up as many tabs as I can with content, and try to work offline to the best of my ability.
Add in a husband traveling in Europe with a phone that wouldn't accept a SIM card, and I've been cobbling together a rag-tag form of online communication all week. The easiest way to do so? Twitter. The mobile version loads quickly, works well aside from frequent Fail Whale appearances, and the short form lends itself easily to viewing on my totally non-fashionable RAZR. Most of my conversation with my husband this week has been on Twitter from necessity, but according to Robert Scoble, we are doing it all wrong.
Sure, I can use Ben Golub's FF To Go on my RAZR, but as you can see from the picture accompanying this post, it's no great fun. It's difficult to read. I have no scrolling, so have to move from link to link in order to read. And by the time I can see the third comment, the first one is gone, and I have to scroll back up to remember what I may have wanted to reply to in the first place. Not to mention my phone browser keeps wanting to go back to FFToGo's original state whenever I come back to it. When I pointed this out in the FriendFeed thread, one response was "time to get a new phone."
No, it's not time to get a new phone. It's time to realize that most people in the world aren't connected to the Internet 24/7, and last time I checked, no one was offering a private beta for plugs in our heads. Most people don't have iPhones with unlimited data plans. Most people can't afford wireless card add-ons for constant connectivity from their laptops. Most people can't afford to buy the latest and greatest phone to use the latest shiny app that the early adopter crowd has flocked to.
In developing new applications and sites, it's tempting to design for the Twitterati. They have pretty iPhones, and you can make lovely mobile apps for iPhones. But the Twitterati alone can't support an app. In order to gain mainstream acceptance, it has to be usable and appeal to at least the Tech Middle Class. MySpace and Facebook went mainstream because they didn't require constant attention. If I do need to use an app on my phone, Facebook looks much better on my phone than FriendFeed does. So does Twitter. And while the conversation may be great, if it's always the same old people saying the same old things without ever making it readily available to the next lowest digital class, it's going to circle around the same exact topics of conversation, eventually winding down.
Joe and Jane Average have no desire to be continuously connected, as Stowe Boyd deals with. Maybe instead of expecting them to be, we should be working to develop applications and usage patterns that don't require that same level of dedication to being online.
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Svetlana Gladkova
Opensource 
Michael Fidler 
I find the whole FriendFeed vs. Twitter commentary stupid and sometimes I wish Scoble would cease with deliberately trying to stir it up, though it doesn’t bother me much. I don’t know if there is really a Twitterati. Most iPhone owners have never used Twitter or FriendFeed.
I look at the directional progress. 25 years ago, off-peak connection time was $6/hour. At 300bps! Daytime? It was like $40/hour! $45/mo for unlimited broadband cable access doesn’t strike me bad at akk, although I understand I am fortunate to be able to have that access.
I’m optimistic that in 5 years iPhone and its ilk will be relatively common place , very cheap/free (with lock-ins), and that the data/phone package pricing will also improve. It just takes time.
FriendFeed and Facebook are primarily designed, as they should be, for the Web browser. One of the really neat aspects of Twitter is that you can participate in it without ever visiting the web site. But then again, Twitter’s intent was to be a short messaging service. FriendFeed’s wasn’t.
Scoble probably should be be swatted with a rolled-up newspaper, and same for the guy who told you “Scoble’s right, get a new phone!” But these things I chalk up to user issues, and not design flaws of the products/services themselves
If it weren’t for my exuberance a lot of people would never even try out FriendFeed.
Two Roberts to reply to, and I can’t even use last initials!
@Seidman I agree that there will always be progress in that regard; 9 years ago, my husband and I couldn’t even afford to each have a cell phone due to the cost, even subsidized, and now we both have them. It’s not so much the mobile design as the idea that I can stay connected on Facebook without having to check in every 15-20 minutes. (More like every 15-20 days now, but that’s another article). If I DO need to stay connected to that extreme to keep up, then I need to do it on platforms that I CAN use on my antiquated form of mobile access. Does that make more sense?
@Scoble I agree. You and Louis both have FriendFeed-branded pom-poms. But at the same time, you can’t assume that everyone has the same access to technology that you do. Some of us use Twitter because that’s what works. When you create the drama that follows by saying “You’re doing it wrong” it isn’t going to bring more people to FriendFeed; it’s going to convince people that FriendFeed is some toy of the Twitterati to be avoided at all costs. There’s no right way or wrong way to use ANY type of social media so long as you follow general netiquette and don’t spam. Aside from that, people should be able to use tools as they want to. If I want to hammer in a screw, that’s my right if it works better for me than using a screwdriver I can’t afford.
Scoble…that’s as self centered a comment as ever. I bet FF would have done just fine without your arrival. Just like everything else you don’t touch.
@Scoble: Cyndy and others are saying that even among the early adopter crowd there is a form of “digital divide” and that sometimes some of the commentary (certainly not just yours) is insensitive to it.
@Cyndy: That the Twitter/RAZR combo works better for you than FriendFeed/RAZR combo makes sense to me. But that isn’t the same thing as saying “FriendFeed designed its service for the tech upper class.”
@Seidman. But think about it. Isn’t it? How many people rely on an aggregator to track all their online activity? And how else do you keep up with it other than being online all the time, adding some sort of mobile device? Most of my RL friends are online MAYBE during the day at work, and hardly ever after work. FriendFeed and services like it ARE designed for the tech elite. No one can come up with a scenario for Joe and Jane Average using it, and staying plugged in to the extent that most of us are. Then add in the digital divide even IN the early adopter crowd… see where this ends up?
I did think about it. I’m one of those weirdos who actually likes to think.
I have a lot of thoughts on early adoption and “expense” in general, and if you’re interested in taking it offline, I’m glad to share them but I don’t want to write an 8 page comment response! The extrmely brief version of that is, Internet web sites/services are a lot more democratized than hardware (be it computers, plasma screen TVs, houses or automobiles).
Three years ago Facebook wasn’t a service for Joe and Jane average, and two years ago your mobile Facebook experience would *not* have been pleasant. I understand that you need to be “hyper-connected” and I’ll trust this is a need rather than merely desire, but today, the only people who “need” to be hyper-connected to FriendFeed itself are…people who have friendfeed.com e-mail addresses. If you were Paul, Bret and crew would you make mobile a priority (in any fashion) when you probably don’t even have 50K people regularly using the service on the Web? Facebook didn’t seem to make mobile a high priority until it had well over 25 million users…