Social Media Has Not Reached Mainstream

You don’t need statistics to tell you that "our world" of social media tools like Twitter, Friendfeed, and RSS has not reached mainstream.
     

Survey Your Surroundings

Just survey your friends or better yet, take a look at who you socialize with the most online. I’m willing to bet my next blog post that at least 60% of the users of the aforementioned services socialize with people that are not necessarily real life friends the most when online. I can guarantee that over 50% don’t have family members or real life friends that use these services, and for those that do, it’s because you probably badgered them into it.

Will Friendfeed, Twitter, and RSS Ever Reach Mainstream?

Who knows? I don’t see Friendfeed doing it, but I’ve noticed SocialThing!, a similar service, breaking grounds with the mainstream masses.

Twitter and RSS will reach mainstream, but I don’t see these services being used in the manner that early adopters are using them. Here’s a good example:

I was attempting to explain RSS to a friend. I told her that it’s an easier way to get updates about a site instead of having to visit the site all the time. After I finished explaining how to get the updates, her reply was: "So can I get RSS for Victoria’s Secret?"

Her reply made me laugh. :)
   

Do You Notice The Irony?

My friend wasn’t thinking in terms of blogs or updates about news, because that’s not what she goes online for. Most mainstream internet users don’t go online for these things either. They have the TV, Facebook, and text messaging for that. That’s not to say that our more advanced platforms won’t eventually make it. However, if they do, it will be for an entirely different reason from what made early adopters join these services.
     

Statistics Count For Something

Well, let’s briefly turn to statistics. Marshall Kirkpatrick of Read/Write Web sent me some stats on the traffic between SocialThing! vs Friendfeed using Compete’s site analytics web tool.

Stats provided by Compete.com 

Now Friendfeed, is definitely more popular, but the tricky part of statistics is you don’t know who the users are. Are more early adopters using Friendfeed or SocialThing!? Are more mainstream web users using SocialThing! or Friendfeed? Do you also notice the spike with SocialThing!’s monthly visitors?
    

I turned to a private forum that a friend of mine started. The forum consists of tech-savvy, yet mainstream web users. They consider me to be the "know it all for the web" on the board. That says a lot in my opinion. I took a look at two threads that were started for Friendfeed users and for SocialThing! users. Currently, there are 3 users (myself included) that use Friendfeed and 9 who are using SocialThing!.

To quote one of the forums users:

Side note: There’s a similar service called FriendFeed (Corvy [Me] uses it a lot so I’m sure she can tell you more about it) that supports a ton more services, however, for me, SocialThing is more intuitive. When you add applications, it knows who your friends are already, whereas with Friendfeed, I believe you have to add others who also have a Friendfeed account. With SocialThing it keeps track of all your friends, regardless of if they are also on Socialthing.

While you can use the "imaginary friend" feature on Friendfeed to follow others, it would be much simpler to use SocialThing! instead of manually setting up "imaginary friends". This would be a conundrum for those who have no clue about RSS feeds.

Advanced Platforms Not Ready For The Masses

Maybe the masses aren’t ready for these platforms. Still, these are early adopter tools, regardless of the growth that one may be seeing. They all have the potential to go mainstream, but there’s a lot of work to be done. We’re still in our own bubble. Or are we?

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