Adam Schoenfeld

Last weekend I was trying to get some friends to move a conversation from email to twitter. The most common response to this was “what the hell is twitter??” It started because I was involved in a $20 master’s pool with a group of friends that are scattered around the country. Naturally this promoted a lot of electronic trash talking. Despite my best efforts, all of the trash talking was done via email. I tried to get people to move this to twitter because I thought it would be entertaining and would alleviate the massive backlog in my inbox.

This got me thinking more about how “normal” people think about trying and adopting new technology. By normal in this sense I mean people that are not immersed in the startup/tech world professionally.

Those of us that are thinking about startups and technology all day, reading countless RSS feeds, and trying every new web service that we see are living in a different world than most people. We’re okay having dozen of usernames, passwords, social networking profiles, etc. We try countless new services. We do it because we care professionally, we do it because it is interesting and we are highly curious. That said, most people really don’t care. Eventually (for the successful startups) the value is strong enough and there is enough momentum to get the rest of the world on board. I those of us in the tech/startup space sometimes forget about the people outside of our bubble because we project our tendencies on to the broader population. I don’t think this phenomenon is news to anybody. But every time I have one of these moments, it is a reminder that in order to get most people to try a new service, it has to be 1.) excessively easy to figure out, understand, and sign-up, and 2.) it has to be truly compelling, not just interesting – I can’t just have a bunch of internet-o-holics saying “this is kinda cool”… I actually need “normal” people to think it is worth their time.