Suddenly belonging to the late majority

In my last post I stated that google™ is the service what brings visitors to your website. Now quite a time later I discovered digg™ and registered. I’m probably the last one to discover this new service, so did I write over an outdated service and why?

The problem whe are talking about here is well known under the name of Diffusion. How fast is a technology accepted by users. Everett Rogers came up with a model for this. He seperated users in different groups depending on how fast they adopt the new technology:

Diffusion of Innovation. Image courtesy of Nathan Bailey under the Creative Commons Attribution Licence

In my lifetime I’ve seen two web services making their way to even most of the laggards: first google™ and then Wikipedia. I don’t think I can say this of ebay®, I know quite a few people who dislike it for various reasons.

I have been an early adopter for both named services and I consider myself a digital native. Though my parents were no graduates I breathed digital technology since I was about eight years old. And indeed I see a difference between my generation and the previous regarding technology usage. When I occur a new application I usually don’t have problems to understand and use it.

But then still maybe I am not. I feel with John Randall who writes:

I’ve had a lifelong love affair with technology and it’s potential for creating change. My age bracket, generally speaking, has not shared this interest with me. True Digital Natives have a mainstream culture of online connectivity. My interest in digital technology has been exploratory and forward thinking, and placed parts of my life-style on the geeky fringes of American culture.

The “mainstream culture of online connectivity” is not for me. The Social Web and the Blogosphere are interesting but not really part of my everyday life. So I think I will belong to the late majority here.