The Speculist

According to US Today, we're getting to where as many as a third of us are early technology adopters:

Twenty-nine percent of U.S. households are likely to be early adopters, according to an exclusive county-by-county analysis of consumers' buying habits by USA TODAY and the Claritas marketing research firm. Eleven percent of the USA's 3,141 counties have at least 29% of households that are early adopters. Though these households are most heavily concentrated in metro areas, early adopters live throughout the nation.

Wow, at the rate we're going, pretty soon we'll all be early adopters. But let's have a look at what USA Today says makes an early adopter:

Making phone calls on the Internet.

Replacing landline phones with cellphones.

Using Wi-Fi networks outside homes or offices.

Buying a home theater, a personal digital assistant, a digital video recorder, a high-definition TV or a cellphone-PDA device.

Six and half years ago, when I first moved from Malaysia back to the US, I made daily calls to my then-girlfriend Suraya using a cutting-edge service called "Voice Over IP" offered by an Israeli company called Net2Phone. Was I an "early adopter" of that technology? I like to think that I was, but by 1999, Net2Phone had already been offering their service for three years.

To call someone placing a phone call over the Internet in late 2005 an "early adopter" is to redefine that term. Mike at TechDirt comments:

Once you hit 30% on something, it certainly sounds like it's gone pretty mainstream. Perhaps they need to rethink what qualifies as early adoption at this point. Things like VoIP, mobile phones and WiFi no longer seem quite so cutting edge.

Exactly. Technologies used to be developed and accepted at the kind of glacial pace that would allow mainstream media to sniff them out five or six years in and then "announce" that they are "coming." This would appear no longer to be the case. By the time the MSM gets wind of these things, they're already here. Rather than declaring us all to be "early adopters" of technologies that are already established, maybe USA Today wants to start looking at true early adopters of technologies that really are on their way in.

Fab technology, for example.

USA Today and other MSM folks could learn all about these kinds of technologies by reading blogs. But they're probably waiting for blogs to get past this awkward early adoption phase.