I didn’t realise Dare was back blogging but I found him (again) via Om Malik today. He’s written a thoughtful post about the Web 2.0 era and the difference between early adopter enthusiasm and mass market adoption. I live in the early adopter segment as do most of my friends and people I chat with on the web and we’re often caught in our own echo chamber of enthusiasm. I had the chance to listen to Carl Honore this morning and it reminded me how much – Carl is a self confessed geek but you realise that when he talks about the Slow Movement he’s figured out that there is life outside of the blogosphere and Twitter that Scoble and use early adopters live in.

The part of Dare’s post that really intrigued me is his question to Web 2.0 companies

 

"Are we solving a problem that everybody has or are we building a product for Robert Scoble?"

 

It’s a good way for a Web 2.0 company to challenge themselves but like or not, Scoble is both a barometer and a guide. I blogged yesterday about the latter of these abilities. At times I find his barometer tips in to hyperbole mode and I suspected much when he said he cried about WorldWide Telescope. I was wrong though.

At Thinking Digital this week I got to demo WWT and in doing so had to get myself familiar with it. I assumed I could play with it for 30 minutes, get to grips and that would be enough to allow me to demo for around 5 minutes. Again, I was wrong. This thing is simply stunning. I’m no budding astronomer and in fact have never held an interest in the planets, stars etc. However, 2 hours after starting to play with WWT I realised time had flown by (literally) and I was mesmerized. When I tell people, that maybe gets 2 or 3 of them to go take a look. When Scoble tells people it gets maybe 2 or 3 hundred/thousand to take a look.

The point is that you shouldn’t build a product for Scoble but build a product Scoble will talk (or even cry) about. That’s not a bad strategy for helping you find out if you have the goods to cross the chasm.