Early Adopter Fatigue – Are You Suffering?

A few days ago I made a terrible confession in one of the posts here: I admitted that I have never installed an application on my cell phone and that I don’t even want to as I feel myself online enough spending most of my waking hours in front of my computer screen buried deep in RSS, email, and Twitter updates. So getting out of the house to walk the dog or go shopping should be something of a distraction for me and this is exactly why I don’t really need my phone to be full of Twitter updates – I just want to be able to walk down the streets and enjoy the spring instead of thinking about the witty things my friends tend to update their Twitter statuses with constantly. After all, even doctors insist our brains should get some rest and now and then.

After making the confession I thought that probably anyone who considers him- or herself an early adopter should really be ashamed of admitting things like this – total unwillingness to adopt certain things if we don’t need them even if the entire technology community is abuzz this or that next big thing. And since I’ve been writing Profy for more than two years now and spending most of my time either testing new web applications or hunting for great news in hundreds of RSS feeds I’m subscribed to, I have somehow grown to think of myself as an early adopter so I guess I really should be ashamed.

After all, everything that has “social” in its description invariably fascinates me and I know that I will always fall for the next big thing hyped by the blogosphere – sometimes (rarely) to keep using the service but in the vast majority of cases moving on and totally forgetting about the application until its developers remind me they exist in a newsletter or a press release. I guess this is quite a typical behavior for an early adopter – hunting for all the new things, trying them out and moving on.

Well, I have seen people who are more passionate about being in every single new service launched, especially if they are in private beta. I have a friend who spends lengthy hours hunting invites to private alphas and betas everywhere he can. He signs up to every new service he can find and his wildest dream is to be the first user for some new web application but as far as I know this dream has not come true yet.

To me this looks like probably too much but of course everyone should decide exactly how deep you want to be immersed in the web 2.0 world and exactly how many comments and likes your FriendFeed stream should get from you in a week. But I already begin to feel that we have probably seen way too many “next big things” to still be as enthusiastic about every new startup launched as we used to be a year or so ago.

I’d call this early adopter fatigue – the state of mind where you begin to realize that it can already be too much for you to digest and you start to refuse to use some services because you feel that what you currently have is more than enough and testing an application for the sake of testing itself just does not sound like a reason enough. I’m not sure if I am the only one feeling this way but I suspect I am not as I seem to notice this lack of excitement about new applications everywhere – probably also because of the people having more important concerns like sticking to a job and doing it well not to lose it.

For example, I have recently been contacted by a friend who just registered at FriendFeed and begun using it. He runs a startup and a local tech event in the country he lives in in Europe and is a real expert in everything about web technologies. I believe that before joining FriendFeed he has read dozens of posts on various blogs about the lifestreaming service – simply because I know that he reads tons of blogs. Yet he kept resisting and only decided to join FriendFeed a few days ago which took me by surprise as I somehow failed to notice his absence from the lifestreaming service despite of the fact that we are connected virtually everywhere.

To me this looked like an additional proof of my suspicion: there are still people in this early adopters crowd who seem to use everything but for some reason keep avoiding this or that service when they just don’t feel it is a good addition to their life (full enough already anyway).

Usually when we talk of early adopters and geeks we all must think of some pretty strange-looking guys and girls who can think of nothing but new shiny gadgets and web applications spending all their money on the latest technology things and thinking about nothing but grabbing an invite to some super-secret private beta. But I guess every geek has all the rights to stay reasonable and to only adopt those things that he actually likes or needs instead of trying to be the first to adopt just about anything – even if this new adopted technology means nothing for this particular geek.

And you know what? If my suspicion is correct and this early adopter fatigue is real, I am quite happy about it. After all, it will be better for everyone if we stop hyping a service only because it looks great and we liked what we saw for 10 minutes and than switched to the next thing immediately. I don’t know about you but I am now only testing a few applications a week and only if I really like the idea behind them enough to cover them on Profy or if I see some reason to keep using this service after testing as it is something that fits my own life. So I’d rather admit early adopter fatigue and never download and install an application on my cell phone than keep signing up to everything I can despite of the fact that it must also be the last time I visit their site.

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