I’ve put this on a permanent page at http://www.scoobr.com/niblettes_old/terms-i-like/
New terms I like….
- Ninged: falling into the chasm of usability, where despite the potential value only geeks can figure out how to use your product
- Flocked: falling into the chasms of usefullness or desirability, where despite offering an easy to use product, only geeks want to use it
(cheers to Umair over at BubbleGeneration)
- YA2.0N Yet Another 2.0 Name, pronounced “YAWN”
(thanks to readwriteweb.com)
The old ones…
- meme-peddler: someone who is constantly trying to coin new nonsensical terms and is alway up on the lastest buzz
- brandmeme: a corporate brand message masquerading as meme; intellectual product placement so to speak
- buzzhound: buys all of the meme-peddler’s latest wares, and is always anxious to uncritically show-off his newest purchases
- hype-o-condriac: someone with a strong over-sensitively to all forms of hype due to over-exposure
- hype-o-allergenic: an antidote to brandmemes and other forms of unwarranted hype
I am tempted to trot out this old one… “Let’s make like sheep and get the flock out of here”
Ha! somebody had to say it.
Poor Flock. I think people fail to realize the merits of geeks/hardcore users in early adoption. You kind of… want that. Once you capture them, and they’re truly passionate about it, it will eventually hit some sort of tipping point and flood into mainstream. The only thing I can think of that might get in the way of that is the media pigeonholing it in the mind of mainstream users as a geek application.
What do you think?
Well Moore would say that you can’t reach a tipping point with geeks. Attracting early adopters only gets you more early adopters, with no necessary cross-over to the early majority main-stream markets.
In Moore’s model the passion of geeks simply cannot help you cross the chasm (Apple computers, Linux) and it can ironically often prevent you from crossing (the self-referential feedback loops of an insular geek community combined with a mind-closing near religious fervor for the fetish-object/product — ok so I’m exaggerating a bit here for effect — simply calcifies the product/company — get close to your customers an old business professor of mine used to say, but not too close).
So you have to strategically pick a target beachhead in the early majority and land there, forcing your way in a desperate bid to find your first early majority customers who will become references for other early majority customers to use in make their purchasing decisions (Moore’s definition of a market). Early majority customers simply don’t reference geek passion for the purposes of purchase decisions. So early adopter passion cannot be converted into early majority sales.
Of course I’m just paraphrasing Moore here, and reality very likely isn’t this black and white. So one could, for example, use geek-chic as a way to marshal early adopter passion to help enter an early majority market. However, I suspect Moore is more right than wrong, and inherently marginalized products (like Flock, or the Segway) demonstrate the dynamics of his chasm.
Thanks for posting!
I’m usually not one to argue with Moore (though lately his law seems to have started to lose traction?), but I like to compare Flock to The Sims. It was designed from day one to be made for mainstream consumption and designed with experience as first priority, but they put most of their early energy into supporting the “hardcore” early adopters.
In describing The Sims’ break into mainstream, Will Wright used the analogy of a sexually transmitted disease because it was the significant others of these hardcore early adopters that noticed and fell in love with the game their geeky partners were obsessed with. Since many of these people were casual or even non-gamers, it was a very powerful experience. Apparently this exploded into a viral spread by word of mouth and has since been largely responsible for The Sims franchise to become the best selling game of all time. And there still is near religious ferver for The Sims by a large hardcore audience, as well as an even larger casual audience.
Flock was not designed for geeks (in fact it’s hardcore geeks that believe it’s nothing more than a bundle of Firefox extensions). And I don’t believe they’re looking for early majority sales. They did not intend to have the perception had by the majority of people that know of them, and I don’t believe The Sims had to deal with the same bad timing.
Of course, The Sims could be an outlier. I don’t know of any similar occurrences, but I don’t know a lot.
I suspect the much of the Sims success lies not having satisfied hard-core gamers, but in attracting women to gaming for the first time. I other words, The Sims managed to cross two chasms.
I guess only time will tell about Flock. So far they haven’t quite lived up to thier hype.
I should also say that I didn’t come up with “ninged” and “flocked” (I gave credit to Umair at BubbleGeneration for that). I just really liked thier metaphorical concision (and of course the dig at two over-hyped under-performing YA2.0Ns).
Well just remember it’s not really *their* hype and they are very early in development. I mean, they’re last major release was the first *developer* preview, and that’s more about the APIs than the browser itself. They’re also being transparent very early on, unlike most software projects. It is an open-source project after all.
Anyway, I hope they do cross into mainstream someday. Time will tell!